"The stock market has responded with a 20% dip in the value of Rarity, and record highs for Fluttershy shares."

Yay! After five months, the site has comments now! If you scroll to the bottom of any comic page, you can now sound off and tell me or other people or the forces of karma what you think! In theory, it might wean me off of replying to everything on EQD, but almost certainly not in practice.

There are two obscure references to other cartoons in this comic. A shiny e-doubloon to the lad or lass what can correctly identify both.

This is another of the comics I wrote before we officially started, and interestingly enough, before the Japanese release announcement. It was one of those moments where I was perusing the MLP Wiki in search of comic ideas and stumbled on the fact that the series released in several other countries, but not Japan. The universe eventually corrected this heresy, though it kind of defangs the comic now since the march of reality will inevitably prove it right or wrong. A nation could avoid complete economic collapse, or I could be right. I suppose that’s a win-win situation, isn’t it?

Fulfilling “the prophesy,” I watched a livestream of the first episode in Japanese. There’s an undeniable novelty to it, and they matched up the voices impressively, save for Applejack. I look forward to continuing, even if I couldn’t convince Reef to tune in for the whole thing. I will drag him down yet; after all, next week’s episode will have the first Pinkie song!

If you haven’t started keeping up with the IDW comic books, I can officially tell you to start now. Maybe not the single-character spin-offs, those have been... inconsistent. But with the first arc out of the way, Issue 5 strikes the structure of an MLP adventure episode hard. There’s less blatant fan-service and referential humor (not gone, mind you, just lessened), and I think it’s a far better story as a result. Two thumbs up.

This happiness sings out with a Hi Hi Hi!

GX