#174
This might be my favorite real historical detail of 1914: after a wild day of coincidences and mistakes, the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassin, Gavrilo Princip, finally found his target in front of a delicatessen. Many sources say that it was Princip’s plan, just sticking to the original motorcade route — published in papers and followed, even after a failed assassination attempt, by uninformed drivers — but others like to say that he had just given up and decided to go buy a sandwich, only to find the Archduke when he emerged. It likely isn’t true, as one guy traced the earliest mention of “Princip’s sandwich” to a Brazilian novel from 2001, and it seems sandwiches hadn’t really taken off yet in that part of Europe. But I like the sandwich myth — it’s like that crosswalk moment in Pulp Fiction — so that’s what happens here.
Unfortunately, I didn’t work in the earlier assassination attempt to this story. There was actually a team of assassins, and after two had failed to act earlier that morning, a third finally threw a bomb at the Archduke’s car. But the bomb bounced out and exploded beneath the next car in the motorcade. It wounded some folks, but I don’t think it killed anyone. This would-be assassin then popped his cyanide pill and jumped into a river to escape capture — but the cyanide pill was a nonlethal dose and only made him start throwing up, and the river was only a few inches deep. The crowd beat him up and he was arrested after all.
I was really nervous about how the center of the comic would come out — the horizontal view of Chameleon Kid’s car running out of juice behind Mouse Kid and the sandwich stand. But now, I’m pretty pleased with how it came out. I think it’s neat.
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