Friday's comic!

[murgatroyd666]

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20190111

Nice shoutouts to A.E. van Vogt (e.g., Voyage of the Space Beagle) and Seanan McGuire ..

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Is "the McGuire Book of Beasties" a reference to the InCryptid series in general, or is there something more specific about it?

Meanwhile, the Smakken is thinking, "Won't these humans even take me seriously?"

[batrachian]

Casual battle banter is the best, though. :-)

[tagryn]

Tarvek: it is only "good news" if the scale doesn't max out at three...

[occams_pyramid]

Or maxes out at one, and runs to ten.

[turbobeholder]

Most likely, something like this. As it would be the most ironic turn.

[occams_pyramid]

If they can't even get to America, how do they know about Drop Bears?

[jbwoodford]

Drop Bears are Australian, and AFAICT Australia isn't cut off the way the Americas are.

[occams_pyramid]

Yes, it's unclear whether America is cut off just due to distance, or some specific block. But Australia is just about directly opposite Europa.

[jbwoodford]

I have a vague memory from the Secret Blueprints that the Americas are blocked in some way, and that Thundering Engine Woman claimed that there were some *really* tough Sparks living there.

But Australia is just about directly opposite Europa.

Which means that someone has to have tunneled straight through, if only to have done a live demo of the famous physics problem.

[madfilkentist]

A fairly recent page shows a globe with a heavy dotted line through the Atlantic, separating the Americas from Europa and Africa. No telling what it signifies.

That globe also shows Atlantis, on the east side of the line.

[murgatroyd666]

"Fan Fiction" (which might not be canon) mentions both Atlantis and the Heterodyne Boys making a trip to Haiti.

[murgatroyd666]

I also recall a set of stories, or tweets, or something recounting repeated efforts by a Spark and his minions/grad students to breach the barrier by various means ... all of them spectacularly unsuccessful.

[jbwoodford]

IIRC, that was a bit at the end of one of the earliest physical comics--in the form of notes from a seminar at TPU, or something like that.

[spectrum_09]

In Volume One, Issue One (the first print issue), there is a "research paper" entitled "Reaching the Americas: One Mad Scientists Approach". It used convicts as subjects. The methods employed were "swallowed by whale", "dolphin transport", "catapult", 'teleportation" (convict did not so much 'disintegrate' as 'melt'), "carried by birds", etc.

Researcher was laughed out of the Academy.

[spectrum_09]

In Volume One, Issue 4, there is an article by Boris Dolokhov, "On the Status of the Americas". Briefly, contact with the Americas stops the same time as the attacks by the Other.

[marycatelli]

if they get to India, it's much easier to get to Australia than America.

Meanwhile I'm wondering if they have even heard of jackalopes.

[occams_pyramid]

I wonder if there's a supplement for Tiny Monster Island?

[deckardcanine]

I guess The Monster Book of Monsters was too juvenile.

[deckardcanine]

Hey, wait.... Tarvek doesn't know how the Snagapple scale goes. Three might be worse than he thinks.

[svesjo]

At first sight this page seems rather pointless, or just for fun. But we actually learn that Higgs is not quite like the average jäger, he obviously has a different background, and is a bit deeper than we have noticed so far.

[madfilkentist]

We already knew he's smarter than the average bear Jäger, but the really interesting piece of information is that he's done significant travel outside Europa.

[murgatroyd666]

Oh, there have been plenty of not-so-subtle hints about that. It's pretty much accepted around here that Higgs is secretly a Jäger General ... and that Tarvek knows it, even if Agatha and Gil don't.

[svesjo]

Yes, we know (99%) that he’s a general, but I can’t recall any situation where he has shown this level of theoretical education and reflection.

[murgatroyd666]

Hmmm ... In Agatha's world, a "living document" created by Sparks might be a more literal description than in our universe.