Tom Sewell

Good points, all three, but each requires at least one caveat. "Weird" is always relative. Here along the periphery of San Francisco Bay, gender fluidity stands out about as much as whole wheat bread vs. white. Actually analog is still much more durable than digital. We can still read five thousand year old papyrus scrolls, but optical disks, hard drives, and flash drives all degrade in no more than a few years. Reliance on digital storage and communication makes our entire civilization vulnerable to electromagnetic pulse which could come from a few high-altitude nukes or a big solar flare. "The cloud" is just an abstract concept; it's really just a collection of physical media utterly dependent on electromagnetic communication, particularly satellites. If you haven't seen Gravity yet, the disaster that knocks out all of the satellites in it isn't a fantasy, it's a real worry. And it doesn't take nukes to cause it. There's so much junk floating in near-Earth space now, collisions aren't uncommon at all. We could lose the ability to keep satellites up for decades. No more GPS; say sayonara to Pokemon Go, Google Maps, and self-driving cars. As for high priests, we still got 'em and they can cause a remarkable amount of trouble (crusades, inquisitions, jihads, etc). But EGS has steered pretty clear of religion and its controversies and I think it's an excellent idea for this forum to do the same. For those of you who would like webcomics that don't steer clear, may I suggest With Fetus, Dumbing of Age, and Sinfest.

Papyrus wasn't just an affectation of the Ptolemys; it was in use during the First Dynasty, before the pyramids were built. Stone tablets were never used for general record keeping outside of the Flintstones. It was a big export in the classical age. A huge library of papyrus scrolls has been discovered in Pompeii, and we can actually read parts of them. Way more convenient than clay tablets.

Big doesn't impress Pandora. When she met the Emissary, he also loomed over Pandora. And snakes, even giant snakes, are very small potatoes compared to Pandora in full Chaos mode.

Maybe the big guy is "Set". Set was associated with snakes, among other creatures. However, for knowledge, the go-to god was Thoth, usually depicted with the head of an ibis. Set was basically the god of kicking butt. Several pharaohs took Set names, including the father of Ramses the Great. The snakes ought to be cobras, though. Pharaohs had cobras on their crowns.

Haven't read that much Brat-Halla yet, but going to GodsCo stuck in my mind. Thor's hammer, at least in toy plastic form, has already made a canon appearance in EGS, when Catalina hammered Rich and Larry in Salty Crackers at the beginning of Hammerchlorians.

The "sighting" rumor could have been started by something as simple as a Tweet. It's more Edward's style. Hey, pretty much the same methods have kept Elvis alive for four decades now.

How very true, but not in manga or comics. Well, more accurate. But more fun? Anyway, Fujishima did go to the trouble of doing some actual research, and at the end of the series threw us a spectacular curve: Most of us were expecting the Almighty to be Odin (although I was holding out for Thor) but the authorized daddy of Urd, Belldandy, and Skuld turned out to be Tyr, the Norse god of law. Turns out the Vikings were also very big on Law--and lawsuits. And it's thanks to their semi-conquest of England that we have trial by jury now. As for the main American contender, I don't really care for the current Marvel versions of Thor & Co., although I was around for the Silver Age and back then Thor was awesome!

Going back through Identity again, I took another look at The Shive's commentary when He finally revealed Ashley's name. I was struck that He did not seem to know of the enormous magical and mystical significance of ash trees. Clearly He has not read nearly enough Aa! Megami-sama!. Or in the US version, Oh My Goddess!. In Norse mythology the gigantic ash tree Yggdrasil connects the Nine Worlds. The three Norns make their home at its roots, as depicted in this stamp from the Faroe Islands. The one with the spear is Skuld; among other offices, she leads the Ride of the Valkyries, a detail I once used in a fanfic.

To Edward it is. I can hardly wait to find out how Edward is going to fake a Cheerleadra sighting. I think we can rely on one thing, though: Whatever it is, Elliot will somehow screw the whole thing up. I'm also wondering if "Ronin" will play a part--Tony's nerdy sidekick who started the rumor about Elliot being gay. Ronin hasn't seen Cheerleadra (that we know of) but it's canon that Ronin did see Elliot punch the bloodgrem (or in Ronin's immortal words, "the evil American monkey") into oblivion.

Well, Elliot is supposed to be going to a high school with several thousand students. And it's quite common for teachers to address students by their given names rather than surnames. And I get the impression Elliot isn't one of those students who speaks up a lot in class or is called on very much. Now if you're a pain-in the ass like myself, correcting everyone including the teacher, everyone knows your name.

How many of you actually remember that Elliot's first line is a riff on "Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?!" which was Gary Coleman's signature line in Diff'rent Strokes, which ended in 1985.

http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=2322 Monday night already?

The chick in the fishnets is Dark Sarah from the AF04 universe. She looks taller because she wears platform shoes or possibly sometimes (wait for it...) ...Kinky Boots. Sarah & Dark Sarah. AFTERNOTE: I thought I'd sent this awhile ago, so it might seem dated. Because now it is.

Iconic powers, yes, but one of them was "the power to cloud men's minds" so the Shadow didn't need a costume. Batman is usually recognized as the first modern costumed hero. He's not super, just super-smart and super-coordinated and super-rich. Think Sherlock Holmes with money. His costume is basically Zorro's; Bob Kane was nuts about the Tyrone Power Zorro movie from the Thirties. So maybe Superman is a combination of powers (the Shadow) with a costume (Batman/Zorro).

Please, I remember Microsoft Bob. Back to the actual subject of this thread, wouldn't Akiko be the perfect witness to this? Akiko is pretty likely to know about Nanase's magic, but she's also good at keeping her mouth shut about anything that might upset her mother. Or maybe her father too, although in over fifteen years of EGS he's had exactly one comic where he talked. I was kind of thinking he was actually dead and stuffed. Anyway, it would plant yet another potential plot hook for the main storyline.

Irony. I found my way to EGS because I was curious about that superpowered alien squirrel girl in Jeanie Bottle 102. I'd hate to lose the the EGS forum, but I really want to have one on CD Rudd's works that works as well as the EGS forum here. Comments on the sites are nice, but they close off and really can't be referenced. And I want to address more general topics, like when is CD going to realize that closing down Sailormoon.org so he can have time for Wolfpak is a really, really bad idea. Wolf has tons of character design, I suppose, but it's been on the shelf much too long past its "Best By" date. It reminds me of how James Cameron promised us a live action Battle Angel Alita movie for years, and then finally admitted it was never coming, and seems to be doing the same thing with the Avatar sequel. Or Pixar putting off an Incredibles sequel so they could make a seemingly endless series of crappy Cars sequels and spinoffs and movies about French rats ("I don't think rats are annoying enough--let's make them French!")

I wonder if Voltaire has anything to do with Arthur's and Leifeld's supporting the change in magic?

Can you take Beiber back? Please?!!!

Okay, for all you guys who weren't alive in the Fifties, "Wake Up, Little Suzie" was about falling asleep at a drive-in movie. These were once very popular. They were still around when I was raising my kids, and they were a very good option for families with young kids, especially babies (Since you were in your car, your little darlings probably weren't disturbing everyone else in the theater.) By this time the fare was almost always per car, so it was cheaper. And by the Eighties, most had multiple screens, so you could watch a bunch of movies you hadn't paid for, even if you couldn't hear the sound. You usually had a speaker you hung on your car door, which means you had to leave the window open. This is the reason most Drive-Ins north of the sunbelt closed in the winter. By the nineties low-power FM was providing the sound in more and more drive-ins so you could listen with your car radio, and so you wouldn't forget about the speaker and drive off with it. But also by the 1990s, more and more drive-ins began to close. They'd originally been built mostly out in the boonies where land was cheaper and property taxes lower or non-existent. But urban sprawl made the land more and more expensive, and the tax man began calling on more and more of them. TV had gotten better with cable and satellite was becoming more affordable, so more people stayed home. And owners found they could sell their land for bigger and bigger bucks while their profit margins kept going down. There were something like a dozen drive-ins in the counties around San Francisco Bay in the late seventies, about a quarter of the movie page in the San Francisco Chronicle or the San Jose Mercury News. Now there are only two. Most of them were already hosting flea markets part-time except for San Jose, which did and still does have a permanent flea market where you can buy just about everything. Anyway, getting back to little Suzie, in the Fifties, drive-in movies were called "passion pits" because they were supposed to be a great place for teenagers to make out. I wouldn't know since I didn't get my own car until I was in my twenties and it was the seventies. I do know that no parent in-the-know would let his or her daughter to a drive-in with a date in a certain Nash model because it had front seats that could fold down to make a bed along with the generous back seat. If you want to see one of these cars, watch The Last Picture Show and you'll see Cybill Shepherd making out in one.

How about Roman? One of the most noted successful prosecutions of Cicero was that of Gaius Verres way back in 70 BC. However, Verres chose exile in Massilia where he lived to a ripe old age, surviving Julius Caesar (and Cicero). Since Massilia became modern Marseille, now part of modern France, who knows? Let's hope Edward doesn't take after his possible many-times-great grandfather because if you believe Cicero, he was one of history's greatest jerks. He's a character in one of Steven Saylor's Roman detective stories, Last Seen in Massilia, which I've actually read.

I title a lot of the comics I save, and I titled this one "Huggies".

Something else on Tedd's list of possibly-limited-time-offers: Turning Tony into a girl. Have we forgotten that his mark allows him to change other people's sexes as long as he touches them?

Scores of what? Centuries, decades, lustrums, olympiads, years, seasons, months, fortnights, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds? Naps? Pranks? I said I was hoping, not counting on. And it wouldn't make what Pandora will say to Sarah an out-and-out lie if Pandora now says something like "READ MY NOTE ALREADY!!!" in the floating-little-girl form that Rhoda's seen before. And it's totally in the trope of a good scary Halloween trick.

Maybe we need to expand the canon/non-canon system. Tedd Forgot Something can almost fit into canon except for the tail at the end of the tail, and even that isn't that big a departure, given that no one noticed Catalina had a tail except for Rhoda before they both turned into half-scale catgirls. I have some suggestions for the new terminology: Demi-canon: Could be canon, but not established yet. NPs about Grace's gaming might be referred to in canon someday. Semi-canon: Magical Comics Store and maybe now Tedd Forgot Something. Some parts may have been retconned out, such as Tedd's tail and Nanase taking five bucks from Duck to use her magic to look like she's wearing a bikini. Also Susan baring her midriff in early comics. Trebuchet: Unlikely to become canon, but neat, and gives me an excuse to show off that I know how to spell "trebuchet" and what one is, namely a large catapult which was replaced by cannons but still essential for throwing cows at Monty Python. And there's a "Trebuchet" font out there somewhere.

Say, then, you might know the answer to a mystery. Every college library I've ever visited uses the Library of Congress System rather than Dewey Decimal. Why?