©2007 by Peter Bernhardt. All rights reserved.

Author's Notes:

Happy early Christmas with this early Christmas special! Next week we will have a LATE Christmas special! I figure since this is the "big" holiday of the year in these parts that I would give it two comics instead of just one. Plus I have multiple treatments for this subject, so next week's Christmas comic will be somewhat different... with the same overriding theme of Christmas.

So today's comic is very revealing. The Captain has a very innovative mind! He must've been trudging around in the Amazon Basin when he stumbled upon the Electric Eel (actually taxonomically a "knifefish"). Then the gears of his genius must have started turning, and he thought not "I should get the hell away from this thing because its shocks are strong enough to kill a horse" but rather "I should foolishly attempt to capture this thing and use it to create electricity, which hasn't been harnessed yet, and use that to power a string of colored incandescent light bulbs, which also haven't been invented yet, to decorate my Christmas tree!" Well, displaying his awesome prowess, the Captain managed to do all of these things, all by himself, and all when Ben Franklin was just a boy, and over 100 years before Thomas Edison's birth! That's pretty damn impressive! Get out the history books! We need to rewrite them! Oh... wait, no... this comic is merely a "Special" rather than a true "Episode." That means I've thrown any attempt at historicity right into the toilet and I can make up whatever the hell I want. Granted, sometimes I do that anyway, but I REALLY tend to do it in Specials.

As I was looking up some of the facts on Electric Eels (I can't find anywhere when those were discovered; can anyone help me out on that?), I happened to read that some wacko scientist this year ACTUALLY DID power a Christmas tree with an Electric Eel! So that proves it's possible! Darn scientist stole my idea! The Captain already did it in the 18th century! Oh well, I don't think a cartoon as evidence will hold up in court. Merry Christmas, all!