Discussion for comic for 2017-09-25 (Monday) ✣ .
Working on your Doctorate in Mad Science? Consider making Girl Genius your dissertation topic.
Well now. Three possibilities I can see:
1. The Chief did it, aiming for Greenclaw, and Ivo is being a little slow on the uptake.
2. Some other invisible secret police person, previously unknown to us, did it, aiming for Greenclaw.
3. Ivo lost the tail of the shooter, who was aiming at him as y'all were saying.
(Yes, it could be an invisible person aiming at Ivo, but that just seems like a terrible narrative structure, as does #2 above, for that matter, which is like blaming the butler. The only reason an invisible person makes plot sense is to explain why Ivo and most of us thought wrongly that the shooter was aiming at him.)
One reason I like the Chief as the shooter is that I can't understand "it's a golden opportunity to round them all up." It's not as if it's a secret who they are, and it's not as if there weren't an army of jägers to take care of their gunsels. We've been given to understand that they aren't rounded up because the Mechanicsburg power structure (specifically, Van) find them useful to pay the bills, not because they're untouchable.
I really need to re-read Red Harvest. In it, the police chief is one of the bad guys, and that's the main reason the bad guys remain at large at the beginning of the book. Other bad guys are in charge of particular criminal activities; one such activity is bootlegging, but I don't remember the others. I do remember how it ends, but I figure I shouldn't say, just in case I'm right that it's the model for this story. Bkharvey (talk) 04:34, September 25, 2017 (UTC)
- I think it was Old Man Smithers, masquerading as the Cool Ghoul. Shaggy, Velma & Scooby should go try to lure him out, into a trap. Bosda Di'Chi (talk) 11:04, September 25, 2017 (UTC)
- I will be disappointed if Drozeki doesn't turn out to be the shooter, for all the reasons you mention plus it gives the Foglios an excellent, plot-based reason for adding the bizarre detail of effectively invisible constructs to this story. Admittedly, the Foglios have disappointed me before and they certainly haven't need any reason, plot-based or otherwise, for adding innumerable bizarre details to the main story, but having this one play into the plot for once would be nice.
- I'm not saying I believe the Foglios should tailor their story to my preferences and I love the bizarre details that constantly appear in Girl Genius, but sometimes I think they could tighten up their overall plotting just a bit. -- William Ansley (talk) 17:28, September 25, 2017 (UTC)
- Now I really want to know who 128.227.133.108 is! Bkharvey (talk) 22:29, September 25, 2017 (UTC)
Technical Notes[]
I was very pleased and a bit surprised to discover that the Foglios have fixed the page numbers for this story so that they all now read "Ivo Sharktooth PJ: Page nnn" instead of some of them reading "GG Second Journey Vol. 5 Page nnn". It would have been at least somewhat confusing when "GG Second Journey Vol. 5" actually started up, if the page numbers had been left as they were. It is the first time, to my knowledge, that the small-print page numbers at the bottom of the comic-page images have been fixed.
Today's page was published with the "wrong" date. (This has happened a few times before, but very rarely.) It is dated Sunday, September 24, 2017, instead of Monday, September 25, 2017. Now, of course, the Foglios can publish their pages whenever they want to, but since they have been so consistent about publishing new pages on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, an assumption that the comics will always be published one of those days was built into the chronology template for this wiki. It is easy to change the date for the comic, but it also changes the date for the discussion if you do so. That is why the discussion link in the chronology for today's page of the comic goes to a dummy page which links to this one. Just thought I mention this in case anyone noticed. -- William Ansley (talk) 17:50, September 25, 2017 (UTC)