The current storyline has been running more or less continuously since last November. Today we learned the pointof this interminable flashback.
Hell of a lead-in, but the capper was worth it. I love Gram more and more each day.
Day late and a dollar short. I’ve still got it in my daily comics list, but I no longer pay attention because the damned story has run on so long that I just don’t care any more.
I don’t believe anyone didn’t see this coming, back when she consummated with Kiesl, at the very least.
Wait, did I miss something? She led Kiesl on telling him she’d go to Vienna and then just dumping him?
Neither of them believed that that was going to happen - she was lying (badly) to herself, not to Kiesl. He was playing along (not very convincingly) when he acted like he believed her. That was pretty much the entire point of the last half dozen or so strips before she met up with Bill again. They were saying goodbye, but she wouldn’t admit it.
Thanks, Tengu, that’s what I read it as, but for some reason thought it was going to be a little more to it. Bah, <members of opposite gender.>
On another note…
This arc puts Juliette’s conception in the mid-50s…putting her in her mid-50s. About the same age as my parents. Edda’s about 10 years younger than me. And I wasn’t an early child.
Wasn’t until it started becoming clear that Kiesl’d turn out to be Julliette’s father (and I wonder if Bill was aware of that) that I realized just how late a child Edda was. (Although there were other strips that indicated that.)
I have to say, I figured this out a few weeks ago. It’s a good comic strip, but sometimes it’s just way too obvious (and takes too long to get to the point).
Looks like having to give up her Nazi officer for the American who stuck his neck (and fists) out for her turned her into the bitter harridan that she became.
I can’t get to it in the archive right now, but I was a tad disturbed when she talked in a strip (waaaay back in June when it was revealed that Bill (?) was still alive) about the tragedy unfolding. The problem is that the wording made it sound an awful lot like this brave man who defended her honor, got busted in rank, and stuffed onto the boats for D-Day, only to get shell-shock and eventually make his way out of it except that he apparently could not bear to return to a world without her in it - that his being alive and mostly well was the tragedy.
'Course, that could have been avoided if the other officer decided to stop doing the “right” thing a while before that, and let her know that there’s someone she should know about in the VA hospital.
And the timing of the strip running on Memorial Day featuring her boinking Kiesl - :smack:
(Oh, and I wish McEldowney would lay off the handjive shtick. It was cute way back when Pini did it for Elfquest but McEldowney has recycled it a few times now.)
I’ve enjoyed the storyline, even though it was pretty obvious where this was going a few weeks ago. As for taking too long to get to the point - maybe, but at least it’s well written and always beautifully drawn. There were several points in the story that I thought were genuinely touching. If you want one week story lines and gag-a-day strips, you have lots of other options. I like a lot of those, too.
Now I’m waiting to see if Kiesl makes a current day appearance…
I like long, involved stories as well. I read Girl Genius and Schlock Mercenary among others regularly. What I don’t like is poor pacing, which this story had way too much of. As much as I love GG, its pacing has become a pretty sore spot with me too.
This was no surprise to me either. I do with McEldowney would try to be a bit more succinct in his story telling. I mean, having Eva take 3 days to cross the room in the hotel? Come on.
Ferret, FYI Keisl was not a Nazi. Enemy, yes, but not a Nazi.
He was, IIRC (it’s been a while…) a fairly high-ranking officer, and I find it really, really hard to believe that the Nazis would promote not-Nazis to that level of control and responsibility. And of course he’d claim he wasn’t a Nazi.
He was a lieutenant. In the Wehrmacht. What level of control?
Ignoring that ‘army officer=Nazi’ nonsense (look up the 20 July Plot)…
Apparently you did not read the strip, because Kiesl made it clear early on (while he was explaining his early contempt of Edie) that while he was a loyal German, he hated what had become of the country (and anyone who would help facilitate it out of anything save loyalty to their country).
Then there’s the fact that you think Bill has some sort of moral high ground for beating up the Brit, which means he deserves to get the girl, despite spending a decade making everyone let her think he was dead - and getting hostile when people told him he should let her know he was alive.
No, the one who deserved to get the girl went back to Vienna alone.
He was Austrian, wasn’t he? I don’t know if that makes a difference with regards to party membership.
Yes, but the several points were each about six weeks apart. Mary Worth has had story lines that wrap up quicker than that.
At this point, I’m only glancing at it to see if a new character is in the pretty pictures, at which point I will assume that the storyline is finally over, and I can start actually reading it again. (Unless the Post-Dispatch takes advantage of the end of the story and tries to cancel it again. Back in May or so, they cancelled it and brought it back two days later. You’re not the only one following the current story with bated breath, zoog. 
)
I did read the strip. In fact, at one point when she’s going to be transferred out of there, she lets him know what’s going on, and he tells her that then, perhaps, they need to feed her information. So… did he really give up information on his country, his comrades? Or did she unknowingly (?) feed the Allies false information just so she could hang out with an enemy prisoner? That’s not clear at all.
The point is, she has no real reason to believe him. Even if he wasn’t a Nazi, she quite possibly partially or utterly failed in her service to the country. She almost got Kiesl’s fool ass shot back at the camp by hanging onto his hand. She convinced Bill that she was just playing at being a Mata Hari, to the point where the brash fool assaulted an officer and got his ass shipped off to a hellhole over her ‘devotion.’
She had two men who apparently loved her to the point of doing really foolish things. When she finds out both are alive, not just one, she declares it a tragedy and one of life’s horrors. Kiesl deserves better, Bill deserves better than a woman who considers returning to him her duty, and I don’t feel bad for her.
Anyway, this “BTW, the guy you thought was your bio father? Yeah, not so much” talk not only came way too late in Juliette’s life, but has also dragged on and on since at least mid-November. Please please let him get on with something else.
If he was an officer before the war, I’m sure he’d have been pressed to serve no matter what his party standing was. “Stop-loss” is unique to neither the US nor the past decade.