 |
Adventures of Jack Burton
"Bad Weather Comin'"
Big Trouble in Little China #23 (BOOM! Studios)
Written by Fred Van Lente
Illustrated by Victor Santos
Colors by Gonzalo Duarte
Letters by Ed Dukeshire
Cover by Jeffrey "Chamba" Cruz
April 2016 |
The day of the great San Francisco
earthquake arrives.
Story Summary
Jack's doppelganger finds himself shanghaied aboard a ship a
league out to sea. Meanwhile, Winona leaves the real Jack with
Egg Shen in the underground city while she returns to the
Wing Kong Trading Company building to help him take down Whist.
She finds that Zhou has now taken on the full Lo Pan guise as
sorcerer and, with the help of Lightning, has recharged her
iPhone, using it to learn of the great San Francisco earthquake
due to strike early that morning. He plans to use the chaos of
the destructive quake and accompanying fires to bring down Whist
and Winona agrees to help him.
Back in the underground city, Egg tells Jack about his great
love, Chin, who accompanied him and Zhou from China back at the
start of the California gold rush. Egg says he used his magic to
find troves of gold in the hills of San Francisco which he and
Zhou mined, while Chin cooked and performed other chores for
them. But the filthy conditions of the streams where the horde
of prospectors worked made Chin sick with typhoid and it claimed
her life. Moved, Jack reveals he also once had a true love who
died...a slow, lingering death. When the first foreshock of the
coming earthquake strikes, Egg snaps out of his opium haze and
urges the other underground residents to flee above ground and
even uses a spell to support the earth ceiling while the
residents flee.
CONTINTUED IN BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE
CHINA #24
Notes from the Jack Burton chronology
Though the events of this issue take place in 1906, the
chronology of the characters follows the 2015 events of
"All-In".
Characters appearing or mentioned in this issue
Enrico Caruso (historical figure)
President Theodore Roosevelt (historical figure, seen in
photograph)
Zhou (David Lo Pan)
The Three Storms (Thunder, Rain, and
Lightning)
Jack's doppelganger
Jack Burton
Winona Chi
Egg Shen
Damien Whist
Chin (in flashback only)
Didja Know?
Most of the issues of this series did not have individual
titles.
I borrowed the next issue blurb from the end of the previous
issue as the title of this issue,
"Bad Weather Comin'".
Didja Notice?
The description of famed opera singer Enrico Caruso's visit to
and performance in San Francisco on April 17, 1906 and his
actions the next day during the great quake is accurate.
The wanted poster on page 6 refers to Jack as "Jack Sleeveless".
The Storm called Lightning charges Winona's iPhone and Lo Pan is
able to use it to gain information on future historical events,
mainly the great earthquake due to hit San Francisco early that
morning (April 18, 1906). But smartphones do not store that kind
of data unless the user had previously saved it there in some
way. The phone has to have a wireless connection to the
worldwide web...which does not exist in the current time of
1906, so Lo Pan should have learned virtually nothing about
future history! The No-Prize explanation is that we could argue
he used a magic spell to allow the phone to connect to the
future...but if he could do that, what does he need the phone
for? He just needs to obtain a crystal ball!
Egg tells Jack that back during the gold rush, he used the
feng shui of the hills to find hidden troves of gold.
Feng shui is a type of Chinese
Earth magic that can allegedly be utilized to improve one's
fortune and to harmonize people with their environment, using
principles of astronomy and geomagnetism.
Egg relates that his true love, Chin, died of typhoid from a
contaminated stream. Typhoid is a bacterial infection caused by
ingestion of water or food contaminated by feces of already
infected individuals.
Page 19 states that Whist has lied to his wife, telling her he
was travelling to Vancouver on business (he was really spending
the night in a hotel with his mistress). This probably refers to
Vancouver,
British Columbia, Canada.
The bank Whist owns is called Whist National Bank.
On page 20, the hand symbol Egg makes while casting his spell is
one often seen used by the Marvel Comics sorcerer character, Dr.
Strange.
Back to
Adventures of Jack Burton Episode Studies