A few notes (if you don't mind being taken out of the story). I tend to throw in this kind of crap just for my own satisfaction (albeit, after the fact, with embarrassment), so I'm going to include this as the "annotated" version:
- Baron Heinrich von Froelich appeared in an episode of Jonny Quest, "Shadow of the Condor,"(approve sites) as an expatriot WWI ace living in the Andes. His dogfighting nemesis in the episode was Race Bannon, voiced by Mike Road (here as "Mike Rhodes").
I imagine Gampa Jack would have enjoyed Jonny Quest, when it was an actual prime time TV show, and would have been more than happy to incorporate it into hs tales (just as JQ itself incorporated every B-movie adventure meme of the previous two decades).
- Lee Falk ("Lee Fox" here) was the creator of the famous "Mandrake the Magician" comic strip. Another tale Gampa Jack would be familiar with.
- The overall inspiration for this piece was a favorite issue of Secret Origins (vol. 2, #10(approve sites)), which gave not one but four different "origin stories" for the mysterious DC character, The Phantom Stranger. I managed to avoid inadvertently using any of them here (though I come close with one of them).
I doubt Gampa Jack is familiar with the character or the comic book (or much since Superman in the Golden Age), but he's clearly a storyteller, so it's not much of a stretch. And that all assumes that he actually knows the truth -- and, if so, how.
- I seem constitutionally incapable of making these stories small. I actually started out with a much longer section at the beginning, talking about the old man's relationship with the great-grandkids and his grand daughter (and the name of the missing child in-between), as well as Terry and Jean-Paul making their excuses to run into town.
\\I cut that for length before I got very far, but there's still a whole bunch here I could have reduced -- each of the tales could have been a paragraph long, at a minimum, and still gotten the same effect.
I just do run on so ...
The Story Of The Black Monocle
