Episode 297 of the Letters Page: Writers’ Room: Lone Gun One-Shot

Out first appearance of La Comodora

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So what you’re telling me is Night Snake could be a variant for Anathema… Or Akash’Bhuta.

La Capitaine? You mean Marie Hélène de Faucon?

It’s so weird, I think of La Comodora as a calm plotter, someone who’s definitely got her shit together, and it’s very strange to think of her getting mad or frustrated with anything. Character development!

Yeah, if only Taco Bell weren’t hell on my digestive system. <_<

I super miss Rax. D: I don’t know how big a chain it was, but it was so much better than Arby’s. Also, bring back my favorite old flavors of Doritos and Oreos!

Who’s her first mate? Chiquito?

I am clearly also bamboozled by this dark, anti-letter-writing force.

Love hearing them get into a groove of making sound effects and theme music for something.

I mean… some of her card art shows some pretty crazy-looking grins. Maybe a good way to think about her is not so much patient as focused. She’s still on the chaotic side of the alignment spectrum, while Jim is more orderly and organized. To use Mythbusters, she’s Adam to Jim’s Jamie. Or for Top Gear fans, she’s Clarkson to his May.

My “lost food item” has two layers: Marie Callender’s Sour Cream Blueberry pie.

Marie Callender’s was once renowned for being the best pie chain in California. They fell on hard times, though, and had to close a bunch of locations; there’s really only a handful left, mostly in the L.A. area. My favorite was the Sour Cream Blueberry pie. It was a thick layer of blueberry compote covered in a sweet and sour cream topping. Amazing. But they discontinued that pie years ago, replacing it with the Double Cream Blueberry, which sounds better—more cream!—until you learn that they replaced 95% of the blueberry with whipped cream, leaving a thin layer of compote that was barely more than a streak.

So when most of their locations closed, I was sad to lose their other pies, but I’d already lost my favorite pie of all time anyway.

My second-favorite was the Baker’s Square Caramel Pecan Silk Supreme, which I just learned is now only sold at a half-dozen or so locations in the midwest. Sigh.

I am a little bummed that La Comodora won’t be on her own first appearance, but hey, Unity no longer has the lamest FA cover! I know that characters not featuring on their first appearances probably happens all the time in comics, but I think it does make for a worse product.

That aside, I really like the Lone Gun cover, the colors are really sweet.

Yo, Baker’s Square! I miss them too! Their wild rice soup and the… I think it was a peanut butter pie? I can’t actually recall anymore, but their pies were awesome.

To be perfectly honest and perhaps a little crazy, I think her first mate was Blackbeard.

We know Chrono Ranger gets a cover that is his first full appearance and I suspect La Comodora will have similar.

Only thing that really makes me doubt that is that La Comodora was pretty heavily featured here.

Was Christopher referring to a Polygon article other than the one from 2021 at the launch of Definitive Edition? If another is available, does anyone have a link?

One of the Distractions they showed in Miss Information’s DE deck is First Mate Davenport so I figure they’re referring to him and forgot he was already revealed. Definitely makes things more interesting if he was kicked out for attempted mutiny rather than being lost like he claims.

Time will tell but I will be shocked if a Disparation issue isn’t used for her FA variant.

they have also said there was a story where there was a mutiny and she happily went to rest in the brig until the new captain was mentally broken by trying to control the ship and everyone else begged her to be in charge again.

oh, right!

It is a distraction in a Miss Information deck so I at least find it questionable.

My “lost food item” is the Boston Cheesesteak pizza from the Canadian restaurant chain Boston Pizza.

It was a great pizza with garlic sauce in place of tomato sauce, thinly sliced beef, and I want to say mushrooms, onion, and maybe green pepper. It was delicious. They took off the menu YEARS ago, probably about 15 or so.

I did manage to enjoy one final Boston Cheesesteak ~10 years… Meeting up with a bunch of friends at a BP, my friend Matt happened to be working in the kitchen that night. A mutual friend of ours, Blue, who had previous worked in various BP kitchens, was sitting at the table with me. When I mentioned my favorite and long-lost pizza, Blue informed me that no only did they still have all the ingredients for it, but that Matt knew how to make it. When the waitress came for our order, Blue gave her detailed instructions about how to record my pizza in the system (what to bill it as and what notes to put) and explained that “Matt will know what to do”. There are only a handful of pizzas in my life that I have enjoyed more than that night’s boston cheesesteak.

My local pizzeria, Bona Pizza, makes one that sounds just like that. It’s been my family’s go-to for years. Hopefully we never have to move.

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I had assumed that First Mate Davenport was a La Capitan crewmember, but we don’t have his story and I definitely didn’t think he was her first crewmember.

Looking up the card, Davenport’s quote has him telling the Freedom Five that he’s been ‘marooned’. I’d taken that as just being “got left behind”, but it makes sense if he actually lost a mutiny and was deliberately stranded by La Capitan.

Marooning refers to a deliberate act, not a case of someone being left behind by accident. It was usually a punishment for a disobedient sailor, although it might be reversed and applied to a ship’s captain and/or other officers in the case of a successful mutiny. Marooning didn’t always involve an actual island, being set ashore on a (seemingly) desolate stretch of coastline was also a popular approach if there were no islands handy.

There have also been a few cases of voluntary marooning historically, where someone requested to become a castaway. The real-life sailor who partly inspired Robinson Crusoe demanded to be marooned by his captain because he was convinced (rightly, as it turned out) that their ship wasn’t seaworthy and didn’t want to drown when it went down, resulting in him being stranded for years before another vessel eventually rescued him. But generally, marooning was a punishment meant to eventually kill you, to the point where the victim was often provided with a means to commit suicide when their food and water ran out - or in extreme cases, when the sandbar they’d been dumped on started to vanish beneath the waves.

The term “maroon” as a noun has links to US slavery (specifically, it was used to describe successfully escaped slaves) so be careful how you use it.

Being marooned was sometimes (in a fine display of gallows humor) jokingly referred to as “being appointed as governor” of the island/sandbar one is being dumped on. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any reliable evidence of a victim being issued documentation to that effect - which is almost surprising, given that Age of Sail pirates were often prone to pettifogging legalism when it came to their own crew charters and punishments. Pity, you could get a decent story out of the descendants of some castaway survivor laying claim to an island centuries later on the strength of papers “proving” their ancestor had been made a hereditary governor by some smart-ass pirate captain.

Maybe they will use that Omnibus that collects all of that run?

lost menu item I miss -
Long John Silvers (a chain on the decline) used to have seafood salad.
Little King used to have bean sprouts as a healthy option instead of lettuce or spinach

My lost item(s) are at Taco Bell, also fallen from grace. The 7-Layer Burrito, its associated Crunchwrap, and later the Fiesta Veggie Burrito from the value menu, which is but a shadow of its former self. What’s worse is they have all these ingredients still since every “new” menu item is just another recombination of things from before.

Sad to say, but anymore these days Yo NO quiero Taco Bell.

Was catching up on this, and wanted to mention the Polygon interview that Christopher mentioned: Sentinels of the Multiverse interview: possibly the best superhero board game | Polygon

And my biggest “discontinued restaurant food item that I miss” has got to be Friendly’s Wattamelon Roll.

oh dang, those were good! everything Friendly’s did, really

do they not still sell those in stores?

Nope, they flat out discontinued it.

They did make a replacement cake-like product which is actually still really good… but they also only sell it very sporadically. Sigh.

(Or at least they only ship it to where I live sporadically. Honestly there was a bunch of other food items I could have listed, but those ones I’m unsure if they’re actually discontinued or if they just don’t ship them out anymore to where I live in the boonies.)

the chocolate parfait Kentucky Fried Chicken used to have.
Long John Silver’s langostino lobster bites