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The Snake Plissken Chronicles
"Tag, You're Dead"
Snake Plissken Chronicles #4 (CrossGen)
Writer: William O'Neill
Pencils: Tone Rodriguez
Inks: Kim Werestiuk
Colors: Chris Blythe
Letters: Dreamer Design and Robin Spehar
Cover B: Michael Golden
February 2004 |
Big Red returns for vengeance on
Snake and Captain Ron.
Story Summary
As Big Red and Snake begin a confrontation,
the USPF arrive and a three-way shootout begins. The commotion
allows Snake and "Jackie" to jump onto Darkstar with Ron and
head out to sea. A USPF chopper gives chase, but Snake snags its
tailprop with a harpoon gun, causing it to crash into the dock,
taking out the USPF forces and most if not all of Big Red's
gang.
As the boat heads out to sea for Snake's
rendezvous with the buyer, Captain Ron lies at death's door and
asks Snake what his real name is. Snake tells him and Ron then
dies.
The boat meets up with the buyer's huge
yacht, but the buyer is not too happy that the JFK car is all
dented and shot up from the chase. Then, Marrs shows up in his
blimp to take the car back to the casino it was stolen from and
to kill Snake. Another shootout begins and, with "Jackie's"
help, Snake kills Marrs, brings the blimp down on top of the
yacht in a huge explosion, while making an escape, alone, in a
small two-seat helicopter he finds on the yacht. The rich buyer and
"Jackie" also manage to escape together on a small lifeboat;
"Jackie" seems as if she may try to become the rich man's new
girlfriend.
Snake doesn't look back, having escaped
with the $30 million. But he knows that with his luck, he won't
be rich for long.
THE END
Didja Know?
Snake Plissken Chronicles
was a 4-issue comic book mini-series published by CrossGen in
2003. I borrowed the title of the series to use as the overall
title of the Snake Plissken stories studied here on PopApostle.
The issues of this series do not have published individual
titles assigned to them. I assigned the title
"Tag, You're Dead" based on a line of dialog in the
issue.
Characters appearing in this
issue
Big Red (dies in this issue)
Snake Plissken
Captain Ron Hill (dies in this issue)
"Jackie"
Brusilov
(dies in this issue)
Yacht captain (unnamed, called Gilligan by Snake; dies in this
issue)
The buyer (unnamed)
Marrs
Ohmar
Slim Timm (mentioned only)
Didja Notice?
On page 1, "Jackie" tells Big Red, "You think you're so
Saturday Night Fever, but you're more of a Thank
God It's Friday type of guy, if you know what I mean."
As stated in the study of
"Captain Ron",
Saturday Night Fever was a hit 1977 disco film.
Thank God It's Friday was a bomb 1978 rip-off of
Saturday Night Fever.
On page 1, Big Red tells Snake to back up because, "Me not
member of Village People." The Village
People are an American disco band associated with gay
culture.
On page 4, the injured Ron asks Snake
what the commotion is and Snake responds, "Blue meanies."
This may have a double meaning as in "the men in blue" (the
police) and a reference to the "blue meanies" who were the
villains in the 1968 Beatles surreal animated film
Yellow Submarine.
On page 7, the dying Ron asks Snake to tell him his real
name as one last favor. Snake obliges, whispering it to him.
Of course, we don't get to hear it and Ron merely says,
"...no shit," before he dies.
On page 9, Snake yells up to the towering yacht of their
buyer, referring to the captain as Gilligan. This is a
reference to the 1964-1967 sitcom
Gilligan's Island, about a
group of castaways on an uncharted island on which they'd
been shipwrecked; Gilligan was the bumbling first mate of
the shipwrecked SS Minnow.
On page 10, "Jackie" tells Snake that despite how much the
JFK assassination car is worth, she still thinks the A-Team
van is cooler. The A-Team was
a
1983-1986 action TV series about a group of mercenaries;
they often travelled in a souped-up black and red GMC van.
Also on page 10, the buyer says that with the JFK car, "The
ladies back in Bollywood will be all over me now." Bollywood
is a nickname for the Indian film industry, based in Mumbai,
India.
On page 12, Marrs calls Snake an "asp hole".
On page 17-18, Snake tears a whole in Marrs' blimp and
tosses his lighter inside the rent to set it aflame. But
blimps traditionally use helium gas for inflation and lift
and helium is non-flammable! Long ago hydrogen was used in
blimps and zeppelins, resulting in such disasters as the
Hindenburg explosion of 1937. It would be foolhardy and
dangerous for Marrs to have used hydrogen in his blimp.
According to the "Test Your Power of
Pop Observation" article at the end of this issue, the
lighter Snake uses to blow up Marrs' blimp is a Zippo
Violent Messiahs lighter. Violent Messiahs is
a comic book series by the writer and artist of
Snake Plissken Chronicles,
William O'Neill and Tone Rodriguez, with Joshua Dysart.
The historic JFK assassination car is destroyed in this
issue.
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Snake Plissken Chronicles Episode Studies
