This week Lizzie decides she needs a Nathan’s Famous after being left high and dry by Grandma. When the Tulip duo reaches the legendary hot dog stand they notice a dead whale calf causing quite a stink on the boardwalk… Not soon after, momma whale charges the beaches of Coney looking for her baby.
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Two notes from this week’s installment:
Nathan Handwerker, founder of Nathan’s Famous on Coney Island, took a vacation one summer and left his son in charge of the family business. His son, Murray, was indeed conned into buying a dead whale calf carcass where he put it on display in the middle of a July heat wave. It created such a stink that according to Brooklyn: A State of Mind, “that pleasure seekers, beachgoers and of course potential diners fled to other far-distant attractions.” The police branded the decomposing whale a health hazard and ordered Murray to get rid of it. Of course Nathan came home right in time for the uproar. Murray said, “Pop let me know what he thought about this cockamamie promotion. And he was apoplectic when he found out how much it cost me to hire a man to cut up the whale and tow it out to sea. The business didn’t recover for weeks.”
Also you may notice there are a lot of distinct faces drawn onto these Coney Island pages. As we mentioned when we started our webcomic, The Great Whale of Coney Island was a Kickstarter project and one of the backer rewards was getting your likeness drawn into the comic. We had quite a few people take us up on it and we thought Coney Island was a great place to put our backers into the story. Courtney even drew the two of us into the bottom right-hand corner of the last panel on page 35.
Join us next week for a new installment. Need more context?
