1 {scene: The ground, in front of the burnt out shell of the zeppelin. Monty and his father are sitting down, resting. Erwin appraches from the wreckage.}
1 Monty: Wow, what an explosion! It's a miracle we survived, dad!
2 Erwin: {reaching them} Die wreckage is just twisted metal and ashes. No other survivors. Nothing.
2 Prof. Jones: Oh, this is terrible! What a tragedy!
3 Monty: Now dad, Pop had a long and eventful life, and ultimately he helped destroy the zeppelin and Hitler's genetic dinosaur research plans.
4 Prof. Jones: He still had my hip flask of whisky with him!

This story arc - Monty Jones and the Lost World - began 200 strips ago. Yes, 200 strips! Way back in #365 which appeared on 25 January. In fact, every single Monty Jones strip this year has been part of this story arc. That's 63 strips in the story, which has lasted close to 7 months now.

I'm getting towards an end of the story though, so it won't last out the full year. Probably.

Oh, and it seems I've picked up some new readers, or simply haven't mentioned Monty's first name in so long that people have forgotten it. If you thought the hero of this strip was named "Indy", you should check the cast page.

The background image in the panels, by the way, is an actual photo of the wreckage of a World War I zeppelin, with some blue added for the sky. There's a bunch of Nazis going through the wreckage looking for ... well, remains.

And since I'm on a roll today, someone mentioned to me a while back: "Erwin seems like a nice guy, except for being a Nazi." Yeah, that pretty much sums him up.

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Two things more, in response to queries from readers:

Firstly, even though I used a picture of a World War I zeppelin, this does not imply this strip is set during WWI. In fact, the zeppelin they were using was previously named as the Graf Zeppelin. Since there are no photos of wreckage of the Graf Zeppelin (since it never crashed), I had to use something else. I know there were no Nazis during WWI - obviously the entire Cliffhangers theme is set when there are Nazis around.

Secondly, I did actually make a continuity error here. Prof. Jones lent his hip flask to Sallah, as we discovered in #508, not to his father. My retcon justification is that Prof. Jones has misremembered, and that Sallah does in fact have the hip flask.

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2013-08-19 Rerun commentary: It's fortunate that Professor Jones's hip flask wasn't on board. Whisky is inflammable, after all. It could have made the hydrogen-filled zeppelin explosion much worse.