Poor guy… what, was he expecting the scene out of National Treasure?
As JJ’s countenance continues to get more and more screwed up, Mark displays an expression I don’t think I have ever seen before…
Call it disinterested, lethargic Mark… where even the exclamation points in the speech balloon seem to be out of place! Whereupon JJ displays (again) a massive dose of confirmation bias… We are seeking gold, therefore all that “glints” has to be gold…
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Distracted JJ has taken the gun off of Mark, so here come the fists of fury. Mark might as well have said, “Look, Haley’s Comet!”
Wow great point! You give Mark much in the way of credit here…
Yes, except that—based on the the middle panel—Mark is facing away from JJ; so Mark’s exclamation would make JJ look towards Mark, not away from him. But then again, perhaps Mark planned for Doc to jump JJ. Or, it was supposed to be Doc who distracted JJ, and Mark got his cues confused.
Adding more fuel to the repeated theory that Leola is secretly in league with JJ, Allen has certainly used this bait-and-switch plot device before: For example, there was the “Baldy the Bank Robber” story a few years back, where a blonde babe pretended to be a hostage of Baldy, but was actually his confederate and helped dupe Mark into becoming an actual hostage.
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