Characters appearing or mentioned in this story

 

Doc Brown

Verne

Jules

Clara

Marty McFly

Needles

Jack
Jennifer Parker

Einstein (mentioned only)

 

Didja Notice?

 

On page 3, notice the flux capacitor is missing from the front of the time train. On the next page, we learn that Doc removed it in order to power his steam time car.

 

On page 3, panel 4, Doc refers to Jules as Verne!

 

On page 5, Doc uses the downward slope of a hill to help get his steam car up to 88 MPH. He suggested this idea for the gasless DeLorean in Back to the Future Part III, but dismissed the idea because they'd never find a smooth enough surface. So, what makes the hill he's chosen now "smooth enough"??

 

Doc says the forest the hill is in will become a state park in a few decades. Which park is it? It looks like it's a forest leading into probably the same desert where Marty arrived in 1885 in Back to the Future Part III, which seems to be a fictitious desert, given Hill Valley's location around the Sierra Nevada mountains in California.

 

On page 6, the speedometer on the steam car reverses the alignment of the numbers 80 and 90. Speedometers are not generally designed that way, though there a few old-style radial speedometers that do so for ease of reading.

 

Throughout its appearances in this issue, the side view mirrors on Needles' truck are the wrong design from what was seen in Back to the Future Part III (and in "Continuum Conundrum" Part 2 for that matter!).

On page 9, panel 3, the side view mirrors on Needles' truck are missing.

On page 9, panel 4, the windshield of Needles' truck gets a massive spider web crack on it from getting hit by junkyard debris. But in the very next panel, the crack is much smaller. And on the next page the crack has disappeared entirely.

 

On page 10, panel 2, the DMC logo on the front of the DeLorean appears to read DMD instead.

On page 14, Needles crashes his truck into the back of an egg delivery truck, himself and his truck becoming covered in raw eggs. This is a parallel to Biff's crashing twice into manure trucks in Back to the Future and Back to the Future Part II.

 

On page 15, Doc refers to chicken eggs as "Gallus gallus domesticus albumen, yolk and shell." The "albumen" in the sentence should not be italicized; "albumen" is just another word for "egg white". It seems the letterer thought "albumen" was part of the scientific name of the domestic chicken, but that is just Gallus gallus domesticus, which, being Latin words, are properly italicized.

 

    Also on page 15, Jennifer calls Marty "James Bond" after he makes a quip about Needles' crash into the egg truck. James Bond, of course, is the fictional British super-spy of novels and film. In many of his movie incarnations, particularly when played by Roger Moore, he was known to make a quip after defeating a villain in a novel manner.

    Marty responds to her that he likes cowboys over spies.

 

In panel 6 of page 15, notice that Doc drops one of the unbroken eggs into his coat pocket for some reason. On page 21, he uses it to demonstrate the time parachute concept he built into the steam car.

 

On page 17, Doc remarks that the human mind is the last great frontier and that he should make a machine that can analyze a brain-wave. He did attempt to build a mind-reading device in 1955, as seen in Back to the Future. 

 

On page 18, Marty takes Doc and Jennifer and the steam car to the parking lot of the Lone Pine Mall to check out the workings and damage to the steam time machine. The mall building looks different than it did in Back to the Future; the artists appear to have used a more modern photograph of the Puente Hills Mall (where the Lone Pine Mall scenes were shot back in 1984) as reference and the structures have been remodeled a bit since then. We could make the no-prize argument that they are at a different mall entrance than the one seen in the movie, hence the difference.

 

Also on page 18, Marty reads the dials on the steam time car as showing the last time departed as 2035. But, the year dial looks like it's more around 2010! May 1, 2010, around 11:22 a.m.

 

On page 19, Doc explains that he back-engineered the hoverboard that was left behind in 1885 when Marty went home near the end of Back to the Future Part III and figured out how to build a frictionless dynamo and extrapolate the means to store multiples of 1.21 gigawatts of electricity.

 

In panel 6 of page 19, Doc sees the note in the steam car that Clara left for him when he took off in it back in 1893. The words "I love you Emmett--Clara" are printed on the paper as they should be, but the words are also seen again, printed on a perpendicular axis and running half off the note, overlapping the car itself! Some kind of layout error on the page.

 

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