Tom Sewell

I'm pretty sure Liz would be up for Goth Girl Elliot.

If you're talking about the TV series, besides Charlie there were four angels--remember one of them left the team and was replaced. Of course, you never saw Charlie.

Let's not forget that the original Meddling Teenagers were a four-person crew. Five if you count the talking dog. Rrank rrou.

At this point, Dan should think about making Diane's last name actually being "Holmes." It sounds like the kind of funny coincidence the Will of Magic would like. And I like the way Dan has Susan say "brilliant" like Rhoda said way back in #864 on Grace and Ellen's first day of school.

I'd say Diane's manipulation could have something to do with her trying to please one guy, maybe Rick, and being terribly disappointed and/or hurt. Diane decides she's never going to get close to another guy until she's sure she can control him.

Just like it was a coincidence about the lions, tigers, ground sloths, mammoths, etc.

According to the evidence we have so far, camels--and I mean the original ancestors of the camels of the Old World and the llamas, alpacas, and vicunas of South America first appeared in North America, as did horses--and then they became extinct in North America about the time humans arrived.

I think a credible backstory for Mama Kitsune would be that she had an early crush on Edward but Edward was already crushing on Noriko. Adrian would have started training the two before they were married, and maybe Noriko just couldn't stand to be there to train with them. I wonder if MK knows about Lavender... like to see them together sometime.

Maybe Diane was collecting for the poor American kangaroos?

Actually, there is one comic where if you look real close in the second panel you can see a boy standing next to Diane taking money out of his wallet.

When this song was in the top ten on the Billboard chart, JFK was still alive.

That's a very interesting question. Since there didn't seem to be any problem getting Ellen to go to a different school than Elliot, Nanase probably could have gone to either school. She lives just a couple of miles from Tedd, so she can't be that far out of the North High district. In fact, maybe the question is why doesn't Tedd go to Moperville South? Maybe the Verres home is in Moperville South's district. If Edward inherited it, it would make perfect sense. Not that I want to kill off Tedd's grandparents, but they've never appeared or been mentioned. It's kind of peculiar for Tedd and Nanase because their parents grew up in Moperville. Maybe Voldemort killed them?

The way this comic develops is: Diane feels bad about not contributing. Susan comforts her by saying she doesn't donate to every charity and that checking them out first is a good idea. Susan brushes fends off Kangaroo Man with just three words. Diane asks why Susan gave to Mr. Raven's charity without checking it out first. Susan decides she shouldn't tell Diane just yet what she knows about Mr. Raven and why she knows it. Susan lies ineffectively. Diane calls Susan on her lying. Seems pretty straightforward, right? But what is the why behind point four? Maybe the real reason is that Diane has already noticed how strangely Susan behaved around Mr. Raven. Mr. Raven probably has the undisputed Teacher From Hell title at Moperville South so it would be natural that Diane would be nervous--but Susan isn't supposed to know Mr. Raven at all.

Tan me hide when I'm dead, Fred Tan me hide when I'm dead

William Shatner played a genuine American marsupial in Over the Hedge: an opossum. That said, the last panel gave us yet another similarity between Diane and Susan: Bullshit detection.

Yeah, Adrian being Susan's mother seems pretty unlikely, unless maybe Adrian can make two of himself. His mom can make at least four; she did it in her first appearance, and then again when she met the Emissary of magic. Or she seemed to do it; it could have been illusion, and in the second example, just a convention of showing Box in multiple views in the same panel as she runs around. But Adrian being her father? Very likely now, I think. Dan has never shown the face of Susan's cheating dad, and in three different comics, Dan actually blacked out his face: #575, panel 1 #839, panel 8 #840, panel 1 So as far back as ten years ago, Dan was concealing the identity of Susan's cheating dad. Kind of suggests that he was saving a big surprise, doesn't it? Ten years is a long time. It only took six years for George Lucas to change Princess Leia into Luke's sister, and maybe as little as three considering how she was heating things up with Han Solo in Empire. But I think Dan was planning on revealing the surprise identity of Susan's cheating dad later ten years back, or at least giving himself that option.

Unless perhaps the last time he saw her she was blonde, five years old, and Tiffany. It's interesting that Susan didn't say "Susan Pompoms" when introducing herself to a man she's supposed to have never met before. But maybe Dan forgot he gave Susan a last name. I would really rather have Adrian not be the cheating dad that Susan remembers, but the possibility is still open. Maybe Adrian was involved with two different women at the same time, got both pregnant, and had do decide which one he was going to marry--assuming the other one told him she was pregnant. Anyway, if Adrian is the cheating dad Susan remembers, he probably made himself look younger (and maybe fabricated another identity apart from the old schoolteacher he's been playing for maybe too long) and Susan may be seeing a family resemblance between Adrian as he appeared when he was with her mother and Adrian as he is now. However Dan works this out, seems pretty certain now that Susan and Diane are descendants of Adrian Raven. The big questions are how many generations between them, and who is (are) their biological mother(s). I think I may have speculated on this before, but I'm going to throw it out here anyway. What if Raven is Susan's mother? Switching sexes is hardly off-the-table in El Goonish Shive. Pandora posed as Agent Wolf once, so she's not averse to taking male forms. Would it be off the table for her son? If Adrian wanted to establish a second identity before abandoning his current one, a sexy young blonde would be a good form, unlikely to be connected with a weird old history teacher.

Both clauses probably true. However, Susan has never been shown in the mall before, and put together with her recent concerns with yucky walls and yuckier seats in the food court, she probably doesn't go often. And if Adrian regularly sets up his table, Friday evenings seem like a good regular time. Susan had to get this Friday off. But, yes, more likely Susan is telling herself to focus on Diane. Whether or not Susan will be able to get Mr. Raven out of her mind remains to be seen.

"Focus, Susan." What does that mean? As in "Never mind the half-immortal for now, focus on Diane."? Or "Where did I see him before? When?"?

Maybe not the next page, but I suspect that what Diane has been sensing is what Raven is sensing. Diane doesn't know that it's magic--very powerful magic because Diane hasn't seem to sense it from Nanase or the griffiins.

A study which disturbed the powers that be in Japan very much found that Ainu haplogroups were more common in samurai families than in families with humbler lineages. Theory is that Oda Nobunaga, the commoner who started uniting Japan in the 1500s, wasn't adverse to turning hairy Ainu into soldiers.

So it really is in his blood. For a very long time, I've been secretly (and probably vainly) hoping Noriko to show up as a nine-tailed fox. Her color-shifted duplicates are illusions and they still look like her except for the color shift. And the magic comic shop has kind of slipped out of canon, especially the part about showing her fairy to the kids. For that matter, Melissa is hardly the same character she was back in MCS. However, none of this means Nanase won't get transformation spells eventually.

The traditional Japanese fox-spirit can appear as a woman. However, kitsune also means just a fox, and there are plenty of families around the world named Fox, or Fuchs, or whatever, so it can also be a family name. Besides, fox-spirits are supposed to be shape-changers, and we've seen no sign of Nanase transforming with the single exception of her guardian spell, and then she changes into an enhanced version of her normal appearance.

Technically Nanase is not a wizard because she can't learn other people's spells. But by the rules Dan has laid down, since Noriko and Edward are both wizards, then Noriko's still-unnamed sister has to be a wizard too. There's something that's been bothering me for a long time. Why are both Nanase and Noriko have the same family name, Kitsune? The only tradition I know of where the husband takes the wife's family name is Japan, and that was really limited to the nobility where there was no son to inherit. In that case, the head of the family would choose a suitable heir, adopt him, and if he had an available daughter, marry her to his heir. That's more or less the story behind the family name of one of the few Japanese names recognized around the world: Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. He was actually born Isoroku Takano, the youngest son of a schoolteacher. (His first name means "56", the age of his father when the future admiral was born.) He was adopted by a noble family with no male heir as an adult. However, he didn't marry into his new family; he married the daughter of a dairy owner. But was 101 years ago.

That we know of. But she didn't promise not to watch, and if she has been watching these past few minutes...