Didja Notice?

 

The cover of this issue, as well as the corresponding scene inside, of a crop-duster airplane chasing our hero through a crop field, seems to have been inspired by a very similar scene in the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock film, North by Northwest, down to a petrol-fuelled explosive end for the plane and its pilot!

 

On page 8, as they're being chased and attacked by Al with a forklift, Marion asks Indy if his current tactics are a plan or him making it up again. This is yet another reference to Indy "making it up as I go along", most famously heard in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but also a touchstone in a number of other Indy tales.

 

The plane in which Indy, Marion, and Marcus fly to Havana, Cuba on page 9 is probably meant to be a Douglas DC-3.

 

On page 11, señor and sí are Spanish for "sir" and "yes", respectively. On page 15, señorita is Spanish for "miss".

 

On page 15, Soto tells his new captives that besides the sugar and narcotics trade, he also sells munitions to the local rebels. In Cuba, the time from 1933-1937 was a period of "virtually unremitting social and political warfare", as documented by Jorge Dominguez in Cuba: Order and Revolution (1978).

 

On page 16, Marcus has used the cigar he lit back on page 15 to set off Soto's cache of munitions. The success of the endeavor in aiding in his, Indy's, and Marion's, escape leads him to remark, "I'd say I still have the touch, Indiana." This seems to suggest he may have been a bit of an adventurer himself in his youth. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, he remarked to Indy that "5 years ago" he would have gone after the Ark himself, again suggesting an adventuresome youth. But the early appearances we see of him in books such as Tomb of Terror, The Seven Veils, The Genesis Deluge, The Unicorn's Legacy, The Interior World, etc. even then present him as mostly the academician. Perhaps he has an exaggerated view of his own adventures. The novelization of The Last Crusade has Marcus feeling anxious and depressed because he had failed Indy and Henry, Sr. in getting to Alexandretta/Iskenderun in time to retrieve the Grail, and thinking he was a scholar and a museum director, not a geographer . . . not an explorer...and certainly not an adventurer.

 

On page 16, Soto's shark-fishing boat is seen to be called the Flying Squid. "Flying squids" are an actual animal, members of the Ommastrephidae family of squids, which have earned the common name due to their locomotion by filling a cavity in their bodies with water and expelling it to propel them in the opposite direction.

 

At the end of the issue, the real culprit behind the theft and forgery of the Arnhem Ring turns out to be Ben Ali Ayoob, a past foe of Indy's in "Blood and Sand" and "Swords and Spikes".

 

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