 |
The Snake Plissken Chronicles
"Don't Let a Snake into the House"
Escape from New York #4 (BOOM Studios)
Writer: Christopher Sebela
Artist: Diego Barreto
Colorist: Marissa Louise
Letterer: Ed Dukeshire
Cover A: Declan Shalvey
March 2015 |
Snake orchestrates the fall of the Free
Republic of Florida.
Story Summary
Snake and Curtis escape from the training camp as
the U.S. forces attack Florida. But Snake goes back into the
fray for some poetic justice against the Twins and Meemaw. He
tricks the Twins into blowing the nukes, which he has planted
into the decoy ground missiles, blowing an artificial strait
through the Florida peninsula, turning it into an island. After
a brawl, Snake takes down Meemaw and then let's the Twins go
because they're just stupid kids.
With Meemaw out of commission and their own
forces turned against them, the two young boys are forced to
call their parents to ask for a ride home, swearing they will
never do it again. Meanwhile, Snake steals a jet boat from a
marina to make his getaway complete, but is intercepted by a
ship and is knocked out. When he awakens in a narrow cargo hold,
he finds his hands are tied behind him and two USPF officers
tell him the former president hasn't forgotten his betrayal.
They strap a parachute to him and toss him out the door...they
are not at sea, but in a plane over the territory of Siberia!
CONTINUED IN ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
#5
Notes from the Snake Plissken chronology
This issue takes place on
Friday, October 31, 1997 (which is Halloween, though no mention
of that is made in this issue or the previous). Snake is
captured by the USPF near the end of the issue and awakens
aboard an airplane before being dumped out the hatch over
Siberia; it's unclear how much time as passed from his capture
to that point, though it is presumably the same day or the next
day. Judging from the lighting conditions in the following issue
("Siberia Bob"), it is the wee hours of Saturday, November 1.
Didja Know?
The issues of this series do not have published individual
titles assigned to them. I assigned the title
"Don't Let a Snake into the House" based on a line of
dialog by Meemaw in this issue.
Characters appearing in this
issue
Snake Plissken
Curtis
Romulus and Remus (the Twins)
Meemaw
Ed
Jessie
Didja Notice?
On page 2, panel 1, several toys are seen in the mansion as
the Twins prepare for battle: a He-Man action figure, an
Atari
2600 video game system, a Simon electronic game, and what
may be a Space Invaders arcade game console.
On page 3, Snake is wearing his old outfit again, but it's
not revealed how he got it.
On page 4, after the Twins' limousine takes a hit from a
cannon shell, Remus says, "Holy Moley, we almost died." The
slightly different spelling, "Holy Moly" was first used by
the super-hero character Captain Marvel in Whiz Comics
#2, February 1940.
On page 10, the nukes in the ground across the width of
Florida that Snake re-enabled are blown and appear to sever
the peninsula of Florida from the continental United States,
allowing the sea to fill in the gap and making the former
state an island.
On page 11, Romulus begins singing the lyrics, "Nah nah nah
nah, nah nah nah nah, hey heyyyy--"
before being cut off by Meemaw. The words are from the 1969
song "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" by Steam.
The phone booth the Twins use to call their parents has
graffiti on it reading "Superman was here!" In comic books,
comic strips, films, and television, Superman was once
commonly shown to discard his civilian clothes to reveal his
Superman costume in phone booths when trouble reared its
head.
Page 18 reveals that the Twins' real names are Ryan (Remus)
and Brian (Romulus).
As Snake swims across the newly-created strait from Florida
to the mainland, he clenches a pack of cigarettes in his
teeth to keep them dry! Gotta have your priorities. The
package design appears to be Marlboro.
Back to
Snake Plissken Chronicles Episode Studies
