Vital Statistics

In the very first Fighting Fantasy book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, if you reach the battle with the titular Warlock and choose to fight him at his strongest, then he has SKILL 11 STAMINA 18. However, there are multiple ways of approaching this final encounter, including one that significantly weakens him to SKILL 7 STAMINA 12, and one where you can even bypass fighting him entirely. The book was co-authored by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, but Jackson was responsible for writing the last battle.

Ten years later, though, Livingstone was the sole author of the sequel, Return to Firetop Mountain...

...and he remembered to give the resurrected Warlock the same statistics as his strongest possible version from the original book. A nice touch I'd never noticed before now.

My Way or the Driveway

Which is the first episode of The Simpsons to use the short version of the opening sequence, the one which goes from the title in the clouds straight to the driveway?

If you watch the episodes in sequence on DVD, or on Disney+, or on any other format you may care to think of, or look at any online reference list, then that will say it was "Lisa's Substitute" from late in the second season, originally broadcast in the US on 25 April 1991.

That episode was certainly the first one that was always intended to feature that intro. It was not, however, the first time it had been seen by those watching the episodes when they first aired.

Home Video

I usually save pictures from gigs for other parts of the internet, but these photos of Lucy Dacus' acoustic set at the Trinity Centre (matinee show) last Sunday turned out quite nicely, it was a fun show that really cheered me up, and, hey, they break up all the posts on the minutiae of British comics.

Fool If You Think It's Over

This is the April Fool-themed Desperate Dan story which took up the cover and first two inside pages of issue #2837 of the Dandy, dated April 6th, 1996. There are two very strange things about it, and one thing which turned out to be less strange than I first thought.

First of all -- how did the scriptwriter apparently forget about the existence of the month of March? Is this a deliberate mistake tying in with the nature of the story? That is a question I can't definitively answer, but the second very strange thing is: what is Dennis the Menace doing in this story, why does he disappear right after the front cover, and why does he look decidedly out of place with the rest of the strip, as if he was drawn in later? Obviously, yes, the explanation is that it's also April Fool-related, but if we look at the cover story of issue #2803 of the Beano, dated April 6th, 1996, all becomes clear: