Petulant is a reasonable way to describe my decision to alter posts twenty days after the fact.  

I defended the content of my first post because of Jough's reference to Harvard, which seemed to suggest that I posted what I did because I consider myself a brilliant authority on all things classical and achewood-ian, and also that I ought to drop the pretention.  Such a suggestion, or perhaps only the insinuation of it, naturally irked me.

"To the crows" is not my own.  Thank the Greeks.

look at the first paragraph of today's nate small; note the word "Grecian."  Also note that today's two pages are the twenty-second installment in what will no doubt be a TWENTY-FOUR installment series.

GMA Grube translates Plato very nicely (or so I am told), and introduces his works even nicelier.  For these and other reasons, colleges like to use his editions, meaning they are a plague upon used bookstores; notice that the following link to amazon.com shows 176 used copies for sale, the cheapest of which is only 25 cents.

Grube's Five Dialogues

Check out also his versions of Aristotle's "Poetics" and his Selections from Sextus Empiricus; the latter is especially important, as its introduction will brief you on the true nature of classical (Greek) Skepticism, which happens to be a fairly awesome system of thought by which to live.

Has anyone noticed a number of allusions to Ancient Greece in the first forty-two pages of "Nate Small: One Tough Man?"  

The mansion is a maybe-maybe reference to the Labyrinth, and the story's central villain may be a Minotaur (he is called "Moose," after all).  

Whether or not it's an allusion to the Labyrinth, the entire mansion itself is an extended allusion to the Palace Economies of Ancient Crete and Middle Bronze Age Mycenae.  The mundane lists of Moose's and others' activities are _exactly_ like the written records that survive today from the Palace Economy era.  (Similar lists survive today from Near-East civilizations like the Assyrians and Persians)

Nate's intellectual past undeniably alludes to Pre-Socratic philosophy: Nate, with his PHYSICs teacher, investigates "things in the heavens and below the earth"--to use Aristophanes' words.  For those who aren't "in the know" Phusikoi is the ancient greek word for Pre-Socratic philosophers.  

Notice also that Nate's closest ally in the story is a Greek, one who imparts Nate with Greek wisdom.  Similarly, Dexter university's aristocracy produced most of their wealth by none other than RAISING CATTLE; how much more Ancient and Greek could that be?

Throughout the mansion episode, there are vague (note that I used the word "vague") echoes of Book I of Herodotus's "Histories."  Like Herodotus's Persians, the german girl kisses nate on the cheek in warm greeting.  Similarly, in the mansion an animal is cooked whole, which is another strange custom Herodotus describes.

There are other allusions, but these are the ones that came to mind as I wrote this post.  Anyone who sees others should speak up; Apollo commands it.

Something else: Dexter is a stylized anagram of Exeter, the name of a snooty British university.  Remove the second E, replace it with its left-handed neighbor in the alphabet (...D, E...), then reinsert it at the front of the word, and, voila, Exeter becomes Dexter.

Oddly, "Dext-," is a root meaning "right hand."  This might ironically point to the transformation of the E into a D in the anagram.  However, it's also a Latin, not Greek, root.  Either Onstad momentarily confused two classical traditions, or I haven't noticed a hell of a lot of other references.  Is there a Latinist in the house?

One wonders whether, in the end, Onstad will divide "Nate Small: One Tough Man" into twenty-four chapters (like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey)

Great quote, PST.  Makes one wonder... about achewood... and homeric greece...

I'll all decloak as a classics major for a moment to say Fagles has done much to make the Odyssey and Iliad fun to read, but has done little to render them especially accurately.  Consequently (too many "-ly"s), his translations have become standard in the introductory-level classroom.  But for upper-level study Lattimore's editions are the standard-er; as english translations go, they're unmatched in fidelity to Homer's originals.

Fitzgerald's Iliad tickles me, even though it's willy-nilly inaccurate.

http://achewood.plagiarist.com/viewtopic.php?t=563

All People,
A few of you may know about Young-Hai Chang, "Croatian Tales of Long Ago," or NoiseRover, but most of you probably do not.  For those of you in the latter group:

http://www.NoiseRover.com

http://www.yhchang.com/

more specifically,
http://www.yhchang.com/SAMSUNG_MEANS_TO_COME.html
http://www.yhchang.com/LOTUS_BLOSSOM.html
http://www.yhchang.com/HALF_BREED_APACHE.html

and,
http://www.bulaja.com/FAIRYTALES/index3.html


enjoy yourselves,
SMK

Ooooh, doggs.  He totally altered the shape of the silouette in this strip.  Go back and look at Friday's.  I totally think he did it on purpose to mislead us, and possibly to represent Phillipe's worst fears, but dag, yo.  We done got lied to.  

JLDunston is right.  Onstad changed the silhouette.  He originally planned that chairman mao would be the one to put a bullet in the deer.

as for bluebird: dragged?  the problem here isn't onstad's plotting (which, by the way, was superb); it's your ADHD.