Poking Around Part 150

I seem to always say whenever I return to this comic after a long time but: it almost took me out, but I did it. I really  did it…  Thank you so much for waiting!

This page went through several iterations and revisions before I was finally satisfied. So this is one of several pages I worked on this month, albeit non-sequentially. So later pages are done and I’m doing the intermediary pages building up to them, if that makes sense.  Just have to rearrange panels and speech bubbles so it’s comprehensible to another human being; please look forward to them over the next few days.

Granted, I said that last month but I got ill. When I first started this page back in April, I was in a really weird headspace thanks to the illness and got hung-up on a minor plot point. By the time I realised how minor it was, I was already pretty far down the rabbit hole and decided to finish it. Though given how long it was taking to finally put this together, I had to split this page in half and end on a rather cheap cliffhanger. My apologies.

Please bear with me as I try to get the rest of the pages out. Don’t forget that you can read the whole story here on the Complete Collection.

In the meantime, here are more TL Notes:

TL Notes:

• Wait a minute/ Kazoolahghamoo: This is a reference to the ‘Kazoo Kid’ meme; I had no idea what this was until I looked into the origin of the “Wait a minute” audio clip YouTubers like to use.
• Mysterious Island: A reference to the 1875 novel by Jules Verne. When I had originally started this page in April 2023 but then fell ill, I was watching the 1961 movie adaptation. 
• Darius Heinkelmann: A portmanteau of Darius and Heinkel from this story.  He is supposed to be Rill​aboom.
• Ringo Ededingly: Ringo 林檎/ りんご  is Japanese for apple; Ededingly is from the catchphrase “Exceedingly good cakes,” for this British cake company.   I really did love their apple pies when I was younger.  He is loosely modelled on Flap​ple.
• Wundin Gehry-Wright: A portmanteau of London, and the architects Frank Gehry, and Frank Lloyd Wright.  He is a loose adaptation of Dura​lud​on.
• Kai Nawton: Kai is derived from Kaiji​riga​me カジリガメ, the Japanese name for Dred​naw. Nawton is taken from the English name.  Admittedly, I was thinking of Kaiji…
• Rían Otsuma: Rían is an Irish name, pronounced “Ree-en”. Its true meaning is lost, but has been adapted in English as Ryan. Otsuma is a corruption of 御頭/ おつむ otsumu, meaning intelligence.  It also sounds an anagram of Osamu Tezuka, widely regarded as the grandfather of manga thanks to popular stories like Tetsuwan Atom/ Astro Boy.  He is loosely modelled on Intel​eon.
• Orbil/ Zalinx: Pretty much just robot versions of Orbe​etle and Falin​ks.  They’re robots, thanks to them rather canonising possible future-versions of Pokémon as robotic creatures in the video games Scarlet and Violet.