November 23rd, 2012
23 Nov 2012 · page 159 of 1306
If you ever want to keep an audience hooked, just make them think someone's about to die horribly!
6 days to go, bookmarks, sketchbook PDFs and extra epilogue stretch goals all met!
Cast: Harriet Barber, Sidney Malik, Tim Chiang
Comments (17)
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I could see a wonderful plot twist if this goes horribly wrong in the next strip. :3
Curse us genre-savvy readers (I guessed the same)!
Reminds me of a Jonathn Creek type setup, but hopefully he wont die just yet.
Aha! Your note has irony, Kate, in that we don't know if this is the widdershinverse version of Mystical Mister Soo's death, or one of the many times the trick worked!
HiLARious!
Common enough trick among magicians as seen in one of Peen and Teller's shows, though it seems like a easy way set somone up for a murder :)
Heh. "Manning Coles" used exactly that setup in [*They Tell No Tales*](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1601870264/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1601870264&linkCode=as2&tag=mikewebersweberw "http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1601870264/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1601870264&linkCode=as2&tag=mikewebersweberw"), the third of their "Tommy Hambledon" spy books...
Book title is a link.
An easy enough trick, but people have managed to die doing it.
I'm wondering how a stage magician manages to make a living in a place where people do actual magic.
Actual magic seems to be really constrictive in this universe... I doubt many mages can summon something that could make a flower grow in seconds or protect them from bullets, if any at all.
You could do either, but it'll take a couple of hours of figuring out which spirit to speak to, where to summon it from, what precisely to ask, and what to trade for it. It's not a very entertaining process, audience-wise!
Surely you could do said summoning beforehand?
You'd probably have to trade more of whatever said spirit wants in order for it to stick around to do a trick at the right time.
Including the real-life magician that the magician on stage is his namesake...
He bought it because of carelessness on his part on his props.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chung_Ling_Soo "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chung_Ling_Soo")
The lovely assistant will pull the trigger, the gun will fire, and Sidney will find a bullet in his pocket.
Ah nice! Just reading this comic the first time through and as someone who has studied some stage magic and magical history, I did catch the reference. In fact I first became interested in Soo's story when I saw paul daniels recreate the bullet catch with one of the original stage assistants. IT really left a mark on me (fortunately not the same kind of mark as Soo suffered)
Left a mark on the assistant too! He was traumatized for YEARS.
Because guns are a relatively new invention at this time wouldn't it be difficult to use a ancient technique to pull a bullet out on the air? Even if it were possible to pull a bullet out of the air... without dying...