“I hope that’s not our flight.”
Tandy Computer Whiz Kids “#3”
Archie Comics Publications/Radio Shack (1987)
“The Answer To A Riddle”
WRITER/EDITOR: William Palmer
ARTISTS: Dick Ayers & Chic Stone
COLORIST: Barry Grossman
LETTERER: Bill Yoshida
A pair of drug smugglers are sneaking their cargo under the radar until bad weather forces their plane to crash. Just before the crash, one of the pilots gained a conscience and told the nearest airport to have a detective ready. How does this involve Alec and Shanna? Because they’re at the museum to run another exhibit on technology when they spot the plane and rescue the smugglers from a crash. The “riddle” by the way is just the way the repentant pilot talks, so even the title is kind of weak.
This is when the problems begin, as you can tell by me dropping the usual format. The art’s okay but that’s the only positive. Continuity is always weird since they’re always coming back from summer vacation (a nod to the annual release of the comics I think) and Shanna tells the class about the science club they were in…again. However, despite the Tandy computers already being in their own part of the classroom previously now there’s just a new one in the library to show off how Shanna knows about computers and again Alec doesn’t. The computers also has nothing to do with the story since they don’t use them to stop anything. They just rescue people from a plane who turn out to be drug smugglers, one of whom becomes repentant. The part with the high school girl coming to tell the kids about drugs feels like padding. I know many of the readers of this comic didn’t catch the last time they were told about drugs and yada yada but what we have here is a plot without a story to go along with it. Also Coast City gets called Coastal City in this issue, and I don’t know if that’s a goof or if they changed the name again.
The end result isn’t the best reading experience, but at least they didn’t appear to recycle anything from the previous issues. Overall it’s an idea without proper form and not really worth looking into as a result both as a story and a “just say no to drugs” PSA.
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