Didja Notice?

 

Page 1 of this issue is a preview of the major characters to be seen in this storyline, written and drawn in a fashion similar to story teasers found in the Sunday comics page of newspapers announcing the next storyline of a popular strip in the mid-1900s.

 

As the story opens, Bill Lawton is the captain of the private merchant vessel Black Pete. The name of the ship may be a reference to the Black Pete (Zwarte Piet) of Dutch folklore, said to be an assistant to Saint Nicholas, helping to distribute gifts and sweets to well-behaved children.

 

On page 2, panel 2, Lawton assumes what Indiana Jones has hired his boat for is the finding of fortune and glory. Indy's concepts of "fortune and glory" were a repeating theme of his adventure in The Temple of Doom.

 

On top of the iceberg, Indy and Lawton discover an ancient Viking knarr. A knarr is a specialized, durable Norse merchant ship used for long-distance trading, colonization, and cargo transport across the North Atlantic by the Vikings from about 790–1100 AD.

 

Indy says Marcus will love the Viking discovery and probably give it its own wing in the National Museum. The National Museum is the fictitious museum for which Marcus Brody is a curator.

 

The "Little Ice Age" mentioned by Indy on page 6 was a regional cooling period in Europe and North America from about 1300-1850 AD. Indy's estimation of 1200 as the year when the knarr got caught up in a severe squall of the Little Ice Age is a bit off in time, both in terms of the Little Ice Age itself and the use of knarrs by the Vikings.

 

Lawton's crew believe that the iceberg is being drawn south to the Sargasso Sea. The Sargasso Sea is a unique 2-million-square-mile ecosystem in the North Atlantic Ocean, defined by rotating currents (the North Atlantic Gyre) rather than land boundaries and characterized by calm, deep-blue water and massive mats of floating Sargassum seaweed, which provide essential, floating habitat for numerous marine species, including endangered eels, turtles, and fish. The legend of ships forever mired in thick, impenetrable seaweed there is a maritime myth.

 

As Indy states on page 7, Viking weapons were often passed down from father to son for generations, symbolizing a direct connection to ancestral glory.

 

Etched into the blade of the battle ax held by the frozen Viking captain of the knarr, Indy finds runes and a map. Indy translates the runes as stating the ax belongs to Leif Ericsson and describes a journey to Vinland. Leif Ericsson (~970-1025 AD) was a Viking explorer who is believed by many historians to have been the first European to set foot in North America over 500 years before Christopher Columbus. Vinland was the name of an area of the North American coast said to have been explored by Ericsson.

 

As Indy hangs precariously off the iceberg over the ocean, Lawton gleefully exclaims, "Har! Yer 'tween the devil an' the deep blue sea now!" The phrase "between the devil and the deep blue sea" originates from 17th-century nautical terminology, describing a precarious position where a sailor had to caulk the "devil" (the longest seam on a wooden ship's hull) while suspended over the "deep blue sea".

 

Page 11 reveals that Lawton was also the captain of the Vasquez de Coronado, the ship that sank when Indy recovered the Cross of Coronado in The Last Crusade, originally lost in "The Cross of Coronado".

 

Indy and his crew are picked up by the cruise liner Normandie. This was a real world French ocean liner of the time and is the most powerful steam turbo-electric-propelled passenger ship ever built.

 

Masquerading as Indy's older brother, New Jersey Jones chides his rescued little bro for going off to search for Xanadu without him. This refers to Kubla Khan, an 1816 poem by English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge about the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan (1215-1294) and his summer capital, Shangdu, also known as Xanadu.

 

On page 14, Indy states that he's an only child. But that's not quite true. It was revealed in "The Yin-Yang Principle" that Indy had a sister named Susie who died at a young age.

 

On page 15, mon dieu and bienvenu are French for "My God" and "welcome".

 

When Baroness Horak accuses New Jersey of selling her an artifact of "solid gold" that is anything but, he inspects it with a jeweler's loop and concedes that she is correct, it isn't gold but "caniffite", a rare lead-like ore which oxidizes a golden sheen and makes the artifact worth twice what she paid him for it. He is conning her again, of course. "Caniffite" is not a known ore. The word is sometimes used as a descriptor for fans of the comic strip work of Milton Caniff (1907-1988), who wrote and illustrated adventure comic strips like Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon, which heavily influenced this mini-series.

 

New Jersey claims to the baroness that he and Indy recovered her artifact in the savage Tribeca Desert. There is, of course, no Tribeca Desert. Tribeca is a Lower Manhattan neighborhood of New York City, the name being an abbreviation of "Triangle Below Canal Street".

 

Indy tells Cairo she has an interesting name and remarks that he's been to Cairo and has a lot of good memories of it. She brushes him off and tells him it's not as accommodating as you might think.

 

On page 18, New Jersey claims that he and Indy are planning an Antarctic expedition to gather Eskimo artifacts. The term "Eskimo" is used to describe the native inhabitants of the northern-most portions of North America and the Arctic, while the Antarctic as mentioned by New Jersey is the polar region of the southern hemisphere, with no native inhabitants. The generally-preferred term is "Inuit", though other cultural descriptors may sometimes be used. The "Eskimo" term has come to be viewed as a slur, as it is believed to be related to the Cree word askâwa, meaning "raw meat", suggesting an eater of raw meat, or a barbarian.

 

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