Great Shrieking Rats!

How Do You Like That As An Expostulation?
It mirrors that other recent creation of mine, "Great Squeaking Bats!" both being mammals, as you already know.  Yes yes yes, I know rats are rather more prone to squeaking than shrieking, well you can't have both the rats and bats squeaking together; it would cause terrible confusion.
     Which you might already be suffering from.  Art?

The Victor Comic

    You see, I was trawling through an index of all the stories ever compiled in "The Victor" and since it had a print run of about 30 years and was published weekly, that's a verrrry long list.  I came across an entry that definitely struck a bell, which mentioned the characters "Sir Stanley Brand and his son, Peter Brand" and which informed that they were in the strip "Three On The Terror Trail", which concerned Dacoits trying to murder our heroes with GIANT RATS!
     The thing is, I remember reading this story about 50 years ago.  As I recall, the Dacoits (shiftless killers from India) hid a substance about themselves that, when fed to a domestic rat, caused it to grow to the size of a Dobermann.  Naturally they sought to kill our protagonists with temporarily enlargened homicidal rats, because anything as straightforward as a gun would be cheating (I think).
     However, can I find an illustration of this strip to elucidate my assertion?  No!
     And do you know why not?  Art!

The confounding factor

     I remember at one point the police are confronted with one of these gigantic rodents and are in mortal peril - until said rat espies a cat, freaks out and runs for it.  The grateful police explicate that the rat saw it's natural enemy and built-in reflexes, not to mention rank cowardice, caused it to flee.
     Don't worry, I shall continue to look for a picture.  If it were any good, I could provide you with pictures of a giant homicidal mole - No?  Okay then.  I do remember another strip from another comic about a giant homicidal hedgehog?  No?  Really, I'm not making this up!

PROOF!

     Of course, trying to find giant hedgehog pictures is made almost impossible thanks to that repellent oik Sonic.
     Motley, go outside and see what's making that enormous pounding noise, will you?  Take this aerosol, it's Landmobile Shark Repellent, just in case.

The Battle Of The River Pileorick
We are now half-way through Turn Five of this English Civil Unpleasantness wargame, and thanks to Your Apprentice Dictator actually sitting down and reading the rules, it is proceeding in rather more normal style than the previous one.  Art!

     Using March Column, the Parliamentarians have scooted along at a rate of knots, and now threaten a crossing at all three points; both bridges and the watershed between the hills and River Pileorick.  However, you can only cross bridges in March Column, which is a very vulnerable formation if the opposition happens to charge you.  Not only that, to reflect the disorganisation that occurs when falling out of formation at such a bottleneck, those bases that crossed the river were Shaken for a turn.

CAUTION!  Traffic should give way at bridges.

     I also discovered that bases can reverse direction, which I'd missed in the first game and which would have made things a lot more sensible.  You need a fair bit of room to each flank to do so, mind.  Given that the Royalists are only fighting a rearguard to enable their King's mistresses letters powder wagons away, we may see this retrograde movement happening.

"Ye Lettres of Snogge be within our grasp, men!"

"Your Tiger Feet"
A song by Mud about furry cosplay before it was mainstream.  I think, it's been a while.  And what is a tiger but a feline?  And what are cats notorious for having?  NO, not endless greed and an appetite for eating small unwary garden birds - curiosity, they have curiosity.  Art?

Is there life on Mars?

     Not that we've discovered so far.  There may have been, the jury's still out on that one, and one of the prerequisites for life is liquid water, of which we have evidence in the form of terrain features, back when Mars was wet, wet, wet -
     <Mister Hand intervenes to slap wrists and stop this silly musical punnery>
     Which brings us to mud.  Martian mud, to be precise.  Scientists here in Perfidious Albion have been using an atmospheric chamber that mimics conditions on the Martian surface (very low temperature and atmospheric pressure), to see how mud flows on Mars.
     The term 'flows' is wrong, it would seem.  Art?

Thus

     'Frothing', 'boiling', 'roiling' and 'rising up to attack human interlopers as it reveals it's hidden sentience' 'lobing' are all more appropriate, thanks to the conditions stated above.  This means that formations thought up to this point to have been caused by lava flowing may in fact be the more humble mud, being spewed out by Martian mud volcanoes.  We know that the disgusting mud volcano* is a thing here on Earth, and so it may have been  on the Red Planet.

Our Martian refused to comment.

Finally -
A long answer to a short question.  As you will have seen if you have eyes and wits, Conrad has been prating of late about the comics of his youth.  Now, a lot of what went into "The Victor" or "Thunder" was filler material, usually profoundly unfunny "humourous" strips, so some of you are still human - Ooops!  Sorry! - so some of you may be wondering why the publishers don't just pump out a wedge of compilations of the major strips, along the lines of "Dan Dare", from "The Eagle".  Art?

Thus.

     That's a very good question, and the answer is every bit as complicated as that one Your Humble Scribe used to ask back in the Eighties: "Why don't they release more 'Doctor Who' serials on videotape?"
     - and there we shall leave you in a comic-strip cliffhanger, for we have hit the Compositional Ton!



*  They are, truly; imagine an accident in a sewer pipe, that never stops.