Comic strip artist Zach Weiner has done it again. In a 10-panel Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip, Weiner imagines Ahab getting an unwelcome answer to his standard greeting, “Hast seen the white whale?”
“Yes! Killed him!” replies a jolly fellow captain—turning a timeless, dramatic quest for vengeance into more of a shaggy-dog story.
In an earlier strip, Weiner spares the whale, but allows a de-armed captain (possibly that of the Samuel Enderby) to offer Ahab a little perspective. “Oh, it ate your leg,” he says calmly. “That’s pretty bad. Of course, it ate my arm.”
“Well, a leg’s pretty bad,” Ahab responds. “Actually, a leg’s worse.”
“Not really,” the first captain says. But hey, he adds—if you feel some crazy need to avenge the loss of your leg, “Go for it!”
Margaret Guroff is editor and publisher of Power Moby-Dick.
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