Taro Tanaka/aka the Colonel gets his own mini-arc! With some real character development! Unheard of.
While Maru-maru accepted the advice dished out by the distant memories of his former commander quite readily, the Colonel can’t quite bring himself to do the same. Given the nature of those memories, it’s hard to blame him. You can say a lot of things about Lord Kitchener, but an Oda Nobunaga he certainly wasn’t. And the only thing you can say about Colonel Blimp is that he is Colonel Blimp. Or was Colonel Blimp, I guess, since he probably wouldn’t be alive anymore. But there’s always somebody like him around, no matter whether he’s called Colonel Blimp or Colonel de Bretton-Gordon.
But the Colonel draws some actual conclusions from his revisiting the past…he assesses the whole British military tradition, which he was brought up in, as fundamentally flawed, as evidenced by the kind of leaders it had produced. And in a splendid example of real character development, he decides to break with this tradition, no matter how much it used to mean to him, and join the real world.
Instead of relying on tradition, he takes an innovative and pragmatic approach: he lies. His promises of wealth and personal fulfillment are empty, of course, but at least he’s telling nobody that it’s a great idea to die for your fatherland.
And those aren’t supposed to be real statues in panel one…it’s just that the cast is overacting so badly right now, the Colonel quite naturally confuses them for classic sculptures of pain and suffering.
More on Monday.