[quote="Akril"]When I first saw (and translated) that comic, my first reaction was "MHEETU!", but now that the initial excitement has worn off, I've noticed that there are a few things about that cub in the comic that are different from the concept sketches of Mheetu -- its nose is pink(not black), the bottom part of its face has a strange "faded" look to it and those three stripes on its head are pretty striking. Like several people have already said, I also don't think it's likely that the artist heard of of Mheetu (the dialogue in the comic never mentions the cub, so why accuse the writer?).
This cub is a real enigma. All the other nameless cub extras in the TLK comics served some kind of purpose in the story -- the female cubs in "Dirty Cub" were playing with Nala while Simba resisted the temptation to join them; the three cubs in "Shooting Stars" made fun of Simba when he was thinking of finding a star that had fallen to Earth; and Simba had to learn to take care of the baby cubs in "Royal Duties". However, the cub in
this story just appears on the last page and doesn't serve
any purpose. It's like the author of that comic somehow
knew that a small number of obsessive TLK fans would be trying to give the various one-note characters in comics and storybooks some sort of deep meaning or connection to the movie characters 14 years later, and he just plopped that cub in Sarafina's paws just to give those fans something to squeal about once that comic finally made it onto the Internet.[/quote]
Very good points
I had thought it too was Mheetu (still do) but with the odd color variations and such it's quite easily a female cub as Koraden had speculated what with the cub's soft cheeks in two panels. It was quite possibly just a filler cub, something to taunt and tease us fans with
Posted: January 6th, 2011, 9:00 pm
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But like everyone said, we can never be sure.