Thread:Stoop Davy Dave/@comment-1038387-20130614155902/@comment-6369172-20130617150444

"That Black X/Ace and his boss go to the restaurant isn't trivia. it's part of the plot summary. "

It's a quirk, a weird little trademark feature that Eisner throws in, almost every time. Six or eight episodes from "now" Eisner will farm this series out to some underlings, but the fake "Will Erwin" credit line won't change. One clue about when this takes place is that the restaurant confabs stop taking place, another is that Batu pretty much stops having a personality, plus is missing for several episodes. So I was leaving those markers in the "trivia" heading, like breadcrumbs to find the time where that happened. Without these clues, it's hard to argue that Eisner has left the series.

"Those dates in your plot summaries - are they explicitly mentioned or is it speculation? " Those are there for two reasons: 1/ In keeping with Eisner's series-opening blurb: "The following is the story of ... well, we'll call him 'The Black X,' and for obvious reasons, we will use fictitious names throughout. We shall, however, use the actual time and place, for the incident was closed." -- Caption" So in keeping with that precedent, and in awareness that these "Espionage" stories very often take more than a single month to play out, the dates of the stories seem to me to deserve some speculation. 2/ The whole original point of this exercise, from my perspective, has been to iron out the kinks in the timeline of the universe in which the Quality Comics stories appeared. For one thing, there seems to be about 3 or 4 times as much of a world war going on, at any given time, as there is on Earth-Two, plus these wars are starting and stopping quite suddenly.  It seems possible that, given a certain amount of overthinking it, and with some feedback in the discussion threads, to actually make coherent sense of this mishmash of fake nations, Mongolian invasions, Armistices, and so forth. A Sisyphean task?  Perhaps.