Ok, I admit it. I'm intrigued.

Intrigue! From Starslip Crisis.

So, I just realized I never did my monthly roundup for January, something I'll have to remedy in short order. But not right now. Right now I want to talk about Starslip Crisis.

The latest plotline in Starslip has been rather interesting for several reasons. First, it began very abruptly with two men speaking in archaic modern English in what can only be assumed to be a roughly medieval setting. No explanation of what was going on. No helpful "meanwhile, back in 1505" text box, no setup by our plucky gang of museum caretakers in 3441. In fact, the previous strip was just a one-shot gag by Cutter about eyepatches. Kris Straub just threw something completely random at us.

And that's interesting because that's not the sort of thing that Starslip Crisis does. In its roughly one year run, Starslip hasn't been known for wild plot twists and random turns. While some of the plotlines have been somewhat silly, none of them have been complete deviations from the normal plot. The closest we've seen is with the Hardware Pirates storyline, but even that started out with a known character in Vore.

So we've been ripped violently from our usual Starslip Crisis universe to something completely different, with no explanation of where or when we have gone. We can only assume that this storyline is going to intersect with the usual Starslip Crisis universe somehow, but that leaves us with the question: How? My first conjecture was that this was just some kind of strange planet that chose to have all the trappings of ye olde England, and they were going to end up in need of some obscure piece of ancient Earth artwork, then enter the usual cast. But then we got to today's strip, and now I'm not so sure...

It's obvious that the character introduced in the third panel of today's strip doesn't fit in this world. It's also fairly obvious that he belongs in the normal Starslip Crisis world. He talks in "normal" English, he uses the usual Starslip Crisis voice font as opposed to the serif font which is being used by the archaic characters. He's dressed in a futuristic fashion. He's a member of the normal Starslip Crisis universe.

But how does he fit in? Who is he? What's his relationship with the Fuseli crew? And where the heck are we right now? These are the questions that are keeping me on the edge of my seat. My current guess now is that he's a time traveller, and we actually are in medieval England (and I have my reasoning behind this guess. I can't give away all my secrets), but that still doesn't explain what he's doing there (he claims that he's not "doing" the queen, if you catch my drift, but what IS he doing?), and how he's going to be hooked into Starslip Crisis as a whole.

Any thoughts?