Hehe I had a feeling it would end like this.

And for some reason I keep reading "Bugger" as "Budger"...

Iiii-ro-nyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!

Ha! I love how the pictures on the pamphlet are still in the old style. (Well, a lot closer to it ... )

Not that I mind(ed?) the new style - looked really weird for the first two pages, but by page 3 I think I got used to it.

Also, shouldn't Captain Moustache be on there as well?

Gerko, I glad that you noticed this

He wasn't the only one.

I liked it from the get go.

keep up the fine work &c.

M

Love how you incorporated the old style drawing in the pamphlet.

Though why isn't Captain Lucas in the pamphlet?

Jacob Carnegie, oh, good question. Maybe because nobody MISS him

I guess they know Captain Lucas must be dead or all three would have returned on schedule

I could comment on the fate of Captain Lucas, but instead I shall be intentionally cryptic.

Lucas is dead.

Wait, no, that wasn't cryptic at all. I'm not very good at this. I should speak to Russell T Davies, he's much better at being annoyingly vague.

The Deadly Deadly Robots, once subdued, revealed video footage of the incident.

Well, Captain Lucas already has a memorial garden after all :p

It makes sense tho:
He died in the universe they were supposed to go to in the first place. So after they went missing the Lead Service obviously sent someone there to look for them and found Lucas' Mustache along with his ashes.

Not if a mysterious hand with red nail polish on took the mustache out of the ashes...

I don't understand. If they were looking for Llew and Meaney, why did they jump away?

They weren't looking for them at all, but since Tim can take them anywhere and any time, it's not inconceivable that he and Sarah could have, at some point, discovered the Hub, and recognised the faces...

Half five in the morning, insomnia, just read from page one right up to here, thank you for making my sleepless night NOT be a laughless one (quiet laughing to not wake up my love)
get back to work, faster, faster, I am still awake,

You colors are just SOOOO good. The richness and shading makes me feel like I am actually in the desert!

And I just love the word "bugger"

Pooka - No, I'm pretty sure they were looking for them. I don't think much time is supposed to have passed between Llew and Meaney's departure and Tim and Sarah's return. Exhibit A: If a lot of time HAD passed, it doesn't seem likely that they would have been expecting Llew and Meaney to still be there, so Tim's reaction of "Bugger" wouldn't make sense. Exhibit B: Well, they're one panel apart on the same comic page, with no indication of transition between them (if time had passed, that could have been indicated by the intervening panel being a nighttime scene, for instance). I'm pretty sure Tim and Sarah are supposed to have popped back in only a few minutes after Llew and Meaney left.

In which case, if they discovered the Hub AFTER meeting Llew and Meaney, this means it has to have happened IMMEDIATELY after--they'd have pretty much had to pop straight there after their meeting. Not entirely impossible, but doesn't seem likely.

Other things worth noting: Notice what Tim's saying as Meaney interrupts him... that he's hoping someone can "help [them] to fi[nd]" something. So they're definitely looking for SOMETHING... Also note there's nothing to indicate that Tim and Sarah hadn't heard of Leads before, or were at all surprised by Llew and Meaney's story. Granted, there's nothing to explicitly prove they HAD heard of Leads before, either, but still, if they hadn't, you'd think their reaction would include a little more confusion...

Here's my interpretation of what's going on: Tim and Sarah WERE in fact looking for Llew and Meaney. However, they hadn't looked at the picture for a while, and didn't immediately recognize them--and in the heat of the moment, it didn't immediately register who they'd just met. Then, AFTER meeting Llew and Meaney and popping away, it hit Tim and/or Sarah that those people they'd just fled from had looked awfully familiar. They looked at the picture of the missing Leads, and... aw, crud, that was them! Back they go, but too late... the missing Leads had already left.

Granted, I could be wrong with this, but that's certainly the way it came across to me, and it seems more consistent with what we've seen...

(By the way, HTML being disallowed, is there any way to include italics in comments here? I'm not particularly fond of the alternative of emphasizing words by ALL CAPS... (Well, okay, there's also the alternative of not emphasizing words at all, but I'm not particularly fond of that either...))

Nah, I don't think you're right. I wrote this issue, so I kind of have a clearer idea - although I can see exactly where you're coming from.

The necklace - a plot device if ever I saw one - can't just zap you anywhere with the trigger word "Shazam". It can also make you travel in time, and Tim (or possibly Sarah) has a clearer idea of how to use it. Of course, this doesn't come across clearly in the strip.

It's entirely conceivable that at some point Tim and Sarah either found the Hub by chance, or bumped into a Lead somewhere and recognised the uniform. That's the thing with new characters... you never actually know what they're going to do until they do it!

Additional: Tim and Sarah are meant to be from another dimension - possibly even 'our' dimension - and they just zapped away to avoid whatever it was that destroyed wherever they came from. The dialogue in page 1 sort of confirms this, otherwise they would have said something about looking for the Leads.

OK, now I need to go and write a full issue, just to prove to myself that I can... possibly not introducing any new characters of the day.