The Hundred-Eighty-Fourth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

I'm not sure how effective a trap can be if you can clearly see it from the other side of the doorway/portal/hole.

The Hundred-Eighty-Third Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

Is that a rocketboy punching some hillbillies, including a backwoods witch? Yes, it absolutely is. Thank you, the 1940s.

The Hundred-Eighty-Second Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

First off, that's a long reach for a pun, secondly, I have no idea why she's holding up that case. That slip is no more scandalous than her normal dresses.

The Hundred-Eighty-First Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

Was this written by a time-traveler? Is this something they said in America? In the 40s?

The Hundred-Eightieth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

I resolve to start saying 'Crossed Myself Up' every time I make a mistake. Is it a little late for a New Year's Resolution? Absolutely - but not the Pagan New Year, and who needs self-improvement more than the Pagans?

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet

Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet is not a movie about Lizzie Borden. I can't stress that enough. Is it a movie about a young girl who murders her parents with a pair of scissors and a hatchet? Yes. Is her name Mary Hatchet? No. That's just something people call her because of the involvement of a hatchet in her murder spree. She's actually named Mary Mattock, which proves happily coincidental because her daughter later uses a mattock (sometimes called a pickaxe) in a tangentially-related murder spree some years later.

Why have I spent all of this time establishing that this is not a film about Lizzie Borden, despite being clearly inspired by that famous case? The answer follows, in the fake headlines that appear during the film's opening credit sequence:

So I just finished watching True Detective....

And while I loved every second of that last episode, I found one tiny bit of it unbearably distracting-

The whole last exchange was, while not word-for-word, exactly the same as an issue of Alan Moore's Top Ten. I'm not sure why this is. With the Carcosa references in Alan Moore's Lovercraft stuff, I'll just go ahead and assume that both he and the creator of True Detective are both fans of the same 'Yellow King' novel that I'd never heard of before this show... so maybe that observation about the night sky is from that book?

Although, and I know that this is an extreme reach, but both this and Watchmen have a creepy child-murderer who owns a German Shepherd, and the German Shepherd winds up with its head split open down the middle in both stories.

Still - great show, everyone should watch it!

UPDATE:

So I checked around on the Internet, and it seems that yes, the guy's just an Alan Moore nerd, so it's a lift, but probably more like a gentle nod than outright theft, like in Being Human.

The Hundred Seventy-Ninth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

Yes, I'm apparently a child this week. But it's still wonderful.

The Hundred Seventy-Eighth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

If you were completely incapable of drawing a hand clasping a tommygun, why did you put one at the front of the frame? Weren't things busy enough already?

Wow, I'm criticizing a subsistence-artist making war propaganda seventy-odd years ago. Weird that it's come to this.

The Hundred Seventy-Seventh Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

I know I've been taken aback by some of the hard-core violence in these golden-age stories, but wow, that's nasty.

The Hundred Seventy-Sixth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

Am I still an internet pedant if the apostrophe mistake I'm criticizing is from a comic published seventy years ago? Of course, the answer is yes.

The Hundred Seventy-Fifth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

And that's why you don't trust the Pied Piper.

Wow, would that next panel prove to have some unfortunate connotations a few years later...

The Hundred Seventy-Fourth Greatest Panel in the History of Comics

It's a wonder America had to bother fighting a war at all, what with the rate the Japanese were apparently offing themselves at.

Red John Countdown Time!

We're down to the wire now on the end of the Red John mystery, so I thought I'd take this moment to re-asses my theory in light of new evidence.

In episode five, we learned from a detective presumably hired by Red John the man has a tattoo of three dots on his left shoulder.

This seems like an easy way to narrow the suspect down to one, but unfortunately for Patrick, it turns out that three of the remaining suspects each have the tattoo.

What's the significance? Well, obviously since we saw all of them plotting together-

We can extrapolate that they're all members of the same fraternal order of corrupt police officers and public officials that we've been learning about this year. Which isn't a huge surprise, since Bertram already expressed a love for William Blake, and the organization is clearly a William Blake-themed club, what with all the Tyger, Tyger nonsense. Also, the next episode is called 'The Great Red Dragon'. So there's that.

How the trick is done!

So, as promised, here's an explanation of how Red John pulled the trick with his list, apparently proving that he had information that Jane didn't even have access to when the video was made. The show briefly raised the spectre of Red John being psychic, but we can dismiss that out of hand, since his plan to get information from Jane's psychiatrist proves he's working with realistic sources of information. So - how did he make his own version of the list six weeks before it existed? There's a clue in the lead-up to the reading of the list.