Annotated 14-12
This continues but is close to the end of Taro’s “MacGyver/Kevin McAllister” phase, where he was deadly in relatively close combat with actual adventurers thanks to his improvisational cleverness with tools at hand. It’s kinda cool to see that he can do that, but it’s not his primary specialty.
Though Taro’s problem is fairly consistent and evident even here: he’s scary smart for his age, but never quite as smart as he thinks he is. He’s just given Bandit a lot of actionable information when he could have just knocked her out in the amount of time it took him to allude to his work and his allies. He is a bit of a diva in search of an audience.
Fortunately, he’s about to get one hell of a podium, one that’ll move him firmly into his next phase.
To continue BMO3’s observations, she dodged all the footie traps only to run into the one actual boobie trap.
With her feet. >.>
I don’t understand, though. Presumably, these are all tripwires to set off traps, or at least alarms. The only thing that wire tripped was Bandit’s flip.
I thought that’s how Taro got there so fast, because of the alarm.
She caught her feet on the wire and landed on her head. At which point the amount of time it would have taken Taro to arrive is slightly ambiguous. Or he could have been right in the next room. That’s where his “toy” is after all.
I never saw that wire until now! I always thought it was a hardened glass pane
Panel #3 makes it look a bit like a pit trap. But yeah, you’re right. It’s not entirely clear what traps are being triggered.
Taro’s a pretty good villain. Any time you manage to get your readers to root for a 10-year old boy to get murdered in a painful, disfiguring manner, you’re doing something right. :-)
Rule #6 of the Evil Overlord List Taro, “I will not gloat over my enemies’ predicament before killing them.”
In the earliest versions of the list I can remember seeing go past, it was rule #1. I always thought it should have stayed there.
It does seem like it should be closer to the beginning of the list.