Figuring out just which path Hiss Hole took in his jaunt through time is simple enough, thanks to a tracker on the Time Couch. Soon they find Hiss Hole at a pivotal point in the young Warriors' lives. His plan is to abduct and corrupt Jon and his friends when they were five years old, making them his new minions. Jon, Angela and Josh must rescue their younger selves from the wily snake, or risk their future being drastically altered.
However, something goes wrong. The Couch has a terrible glitch, transporting Ben, Billy, and both versions of the elder Warriors back to the afternoon of Custer's Last Stand. Can the Warriors straighten things out and get everyone back safely to their proper whens and wherefores, or will they wipe themselves out of existance through a time paradox, thus doing Hiss Hole's work for him?
AABF09--Hiss Hole uses hypnotism on someone
The chase sequence in the beginning was loosely inspired by the opening scene of an episode of Darkwing Duck ("Quack of Ages"). There's also some resemblance to the plot of the Kim Possible movie "A Sitch in Time", in which a villain schemes to defeat a hero by travelling back in time to demoralize them as a child, but this script was written and storyboarded several years before this movie's 2002 debut.
page 2. Josh's scanner strongly resembles the PKE meter in the movie Ghostbusters.
The exact year the Warriors travel back to is never actually mentioned; it's frequently referred to simply as "our childhood" or "their time", and when someone does give the year, they are carefully interrupted or drowned out. If the older Warriors are 15 or 16 in the present, and assuming time is linear, then if they went back to when they were 5 years old that would place their landing in 1992 at the latest. This is an example of the "sliding scale" principle of comics and TV, which allows the Simpson kids to celebrate multiple Christmases yet still remain children, or Superman to have fought Nazis and Japanese soldiers in WWII yet still be only in his midthirties in the present day (and twenty-something in the Smallville universe).
Chapter two was first called "Sweet Sioux", then changed to "A Boy Maimed Sioux" (a parody of Johnny Cash's song "A Boy Named Sue"), then was changed back to the original title. Chapter three was originally titled "A Glitch in Time".
page 13. Billy alludes to the Britney Spears/Kevin Federline split, which was current at the time this issue was in production.
page 14. Josh accidentally creates a butterfly effect when repairing the time machine, though on page 15 we see it has been inexplicably resolved.
Gen. George A. Custer's look and mannerisms are modeled after Richard Mulligan in the 1970 film Little Big Man, down to his comically overreaching arrogance and his use of the epithet "mule-skinner".
On the second-to-last panel of page 14 Custer is mounted on a white horse, but as the cavalry charges (page 17), he is on a brown horse. This is a deliberate coloring error in reference to an actual continuity goof in the movie.
The illustration on page 15 is not Little Bighorn, but actually the Battle of Wolf Mountain, fought six months later. This illustration was first published in the May 5, 1877 edition of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.
The nature of Custer's injuries is somewhat simplified here. He was shot twice, once in the left temple and once in the left side of the chest (only the latter is shown). A number of warriors in the enemy camp claimed to have killed Custer, including one Indian woman who said she stabbed him in the back while her companion held his arm to restrain him; in the confused melee, however, no one can be certain just who or when the fatal blow was issued. A military surgeon examined the body and, in his report, determined that the position of the shell casings under the body proves that he died instantly of the shots to the head and heart. There was a persistent rumor that Custer, despondant and fearful, had committed suicide with his pistol, but since the man was right-handed, this was highly unlikely. There was a wound to the arm as well, which could have been made by a flying shell or an enemy knife, but no indication that the body had been molested or manhandled after death, unlike some other bodies which had were ritually desecrated by the enemy or trampled by the hooves of running horses.
page 18. "Better dead than red" is a slogan more commonly associated with Joseph McCarthy and the Communism scare of the 1950s.
page 19. The number 88 on the remote readout refers to the speed the DeLorian in Back to the Future had to reach before it could travel back or forward in time.
The first Indian's name, "Dances With the Stars", refers to ABC's 2006 hit reality show featuring celebrity dancers competing alongside non-famous partners. On page 21, two more braves are named. "Eye of the Tiger" is a song most commonly associated with the Rocky films. "Beaver Shot" is a term used in the pornographic movie industry for a closeup view of a woman's private area.
page 23. The giant Indian's appearance was modeled after Injun Joe from the Warner Bros. short "Wagon Heels" (Clampett, 1945). The Gitche Manitou (various spellings) is roughly equivalent to God in the Judeo-Christian faith.
  Originally the fight between Billy and the character of the giant brave was supposed to go for another three pages, and there was a scene where Billy was to eat a can of spinach to give him strength (referring to the Popeye cartoons, specifically "Big Chief Ugh-ugh-amug-Ugh", which features the sailor vs. a tribe of wild Indians). However, following news of an outbreak of ebola in a batch of spinach, the gag was cut. The dialogue between the Warriors and Sitting Bull was extended to fill the gap, as well as extensively rewritten to make the chief sound less like a monosyllabic, one-dimensional caricature--as, according to Sweet, he was in an early draft, and present a more a sympathetic (if somewhat harsh) figure.
page 24. The final closeup of Sitting Bull's face parodies the now-classic advertisement "Keep America Beautiful" from 1971 in which an Indian, watching a person throw a piece of litter out the window of a moving car window, is shown with a single tear rolling down his face.
The iconoclastic "spokesperson" (though he actually didn't say a word) was "Iron Eyes" Cody, a Native American actor who worked with Roy Rogers for many years.
page 26. The cavewoman who clubs Hiss Hole is a caricature of The Fat Broad from "B.C." by Johnny Hart. One of the strip's running gags is her beating up a talking snake for no apparent reason. Hiss Hole's line upon being attacked refers to the HeadOn ads, which were parodied in last issue's cover.
Goofs and Nitpicks
 
  page 20. The chief's dialogue in panel three reads "...the ink on their thumbs which which...". It should properly say "with which" .
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