Fogging up and stocking up - Page 104 of the cartoon about Phill from GCHQ - a free comic that I have been working on since September 2016.

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Complete index can be seen here:

Phill from GCHQ - index

Introduction to this weeks page

On page 71 while discussing which of their possessions to bring along (before Morty gets Mary to be able to transport the comatose Loretta and it doesn't matter anymore) Vincent insists that he has to bring his bagpipe Airy Aibell. He does so paraphrasing some lines from J. R. R. Tolkien's book, Lord of the Rings. Here is the full quote:

“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many - yours not least.”

When I created page 71 I was not sure at all what this could mean, but I recognised a so called Chekhov's gun, a dramatic principle stating that if you mention something specifically it should be used later in the story. He mentioned this a few time in his letters, mostly using a gun as an example.

"One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep."

In the comic's meta-commentary style I even placed a small note on the page that this was a Chekhov's gun.

So on this page I repaid that loan. If Airy Aibell is going to play a more important role later will be up to the Gods of storytelling, but right now the travelling party of Phill has been split up thanks to a bagpipe and the laws of effective storytelling!

Happy reading!

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Translations

Thanks to some very dedicated and helpful people the comic about Phill from GCHQ can also be read in other languages. New pages are published on their respective Hive pages. Please follow them and support their work!

• @vcelier has made the French translation
• @shortcut has made the German translation

The comic is, like all my digital artworks, made exclusively with open source software:

The comic is licensed as
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-by)