Board Thread:The Reference Desk/@comment-188432-20130310185635/@comment-188432-20130804004409

I'm not really, you know.

I'm still highly suspicious of it. DWM had no sooner confirmed through its crossword that "Tribe of Gum" was only a pre-production name of the tribe then it made this move to enshrine the name narratively in its comic. But it makes no real sense, because it should be, logically, the "Tribe of Za".

Why would a guy named Za lead a tribe that doesn't bear his name? Certainly, the production history of the episode is that Gum became Za and therefore the name The Tribe of Gum was abandoned, in preference for 100,000 BC. And the script of 100,000 BC is replete with references that entirely suggest that a tribe is personal to the leader of it. Za tells Ian that "your tribe and my tribe will join together", that Kal's tribe could not have discovered the secret of fire because they would not then have needed to have joined with Za's tribe, and several other references.

The only wiggle room I see is that it's not technically Za's tribe until the end of the story. So maybe prior to his production of fire it's the "Tribe of Gum" — but then who's Gum?

The comic didn't do one thing to explain where the name "Gum" comes from. And my reading of the story is still that they're not the real tribe, but merely dopplegangers created by the psi-responsive metal. If you look at the way Za and others are drawn, they're consistently shown to have those weird, gold-glowing eyes — precisely like other things which are said to be psi-metal replicants.

As with any article here, though, multiple edits of many months and years are usually required to get to the "truth" of the matter. I think that once it comes out in a collected form, and it's possible to examine it as a whole without having to flip through a stack of DWM issues, it's gonna be a bit easier to make sense of the story. We might even get some author notes that point out details in the panels that we haven't hitherto noticed.

And if we get absolutely nothing from the collected edition, and nothing emerges from being able to more conveniently read the story, then I might make my peace with it. But for right now, I'm still putting this in the "doesn't make any sense" category.