You’ll love her, Glimm, all men do
I don’t think I need to explain who Mildred is. I could do it for new readers but I’m not sure there are any new readers. Her last appearance was in Circus Windows. There have been near misses with other Mildred projects, including such long-gestating sketchbook marginalia as “Dead & Breakfast” and “Spell Check”.
YAAAAAAA!!! IT’S MILDEW!! First Jack and now Mildred! This is indeed a pleasant surprise! Here’s hoping she has lots of saucy gossip about the rest of the Mystery Kids. As if she wouldn’t.
I knew it!
Yes!! I had a feeling was Mildew!! Nice to see her fully recovered from her clown ordeal and sporting her classic haircut!
It’s so nice to see the Mystery Kids again 🥲
It definitely is! Only Linton and Sonny are led to recheck in on!
*left to check in on!
and Shauna, no? Is “Great British Bump-Off’ canon?
I’ve been trying to think how I would explain why the Great British Bump Off wasn’t canon. What a gnomic move that would have been.
“A wizard did it”
Regardless of ‘GBB-O’. Shauna was featured in ‘Holiday Surprise’
Which tied in a bit with GGB-O.
YAY!!! MILDRED IS HERE! Everybody really love her, or think she’s a dangerous nutty… I’m very curious about Glenn’s reaction. Or if her collision with Dean Thompson could make the galaxy explode.
I love her because she’s a dangerous nutter.
Me too, John. Me too.
I’m just going to second panel 2 Lottie.
(Though actually not a big surprise. Mildew was top of my list in guessing who Lottie was talking about in the page title.)
And it’s good to see that Claire is squeezing the last dribs of colorless green idea out of Glom.
Is Claire going to try to quickly introduce Glenn and Mildred, to make sure she beats out Lottie and Mildred learns Glenn’s actual name? I could see her doing that.
Although, come to think of it, I could see Mildred really getting into Lottie’s game here. Maybe even taking it further than Lottie does, somehow. So maybe it won’t matter who makes the introduction.
Haversham shows up with her haversack.
(really a backpack, I think, but that doesn’t flow as well off the tongue)
“Entray shay nous” leaves me to wonder if she’s pronouncing the s. A fully English phonetic rendition would have been “entray shay noo”, and a properly French spelled one would have been “entrez chez nous”.
She’s speaking Franglais, a la Del Trotter.
Thinking about “do you need to explain who this is”, it’s been about 3 years since I read Bad Machinery (although I read Circus Windows more recently). I only really remember bits and pieces, but most of the stuff from those stories isn’t going to be relevant here.
It would make sense for Lottie and Claire to give some context to Glenn when they make introductions. E.g. “we went to school together and used to solve mysteries, and now Mildred is studying X at the university of Y” (or “working for her dad’s law firm” or whatever she’s actually doing). However, that can be done off-panel, and there might be other things which are more important to fit into the page count. Also, if you haven’t established what Mildred is doing now (rather than you saying it and me forgetting), it makes sense to keep your options open for future stories.
Isn’t Mildred’s dad a scientist?
Yep.
The editing process is savage. All the things you mention are irrelevant to the narrative thrust of the plot and get cut. In a manga or some woolly OGN you can bang on for ages. I often have one speech bubble to get in and out of an interaction. This is down to the need to run as a webcomic. I can’t take three days of real time to explain who someone is.
As somone who works as an editor for a living (for a publication, not comics), I can confirm that the editing process is indeed savage.
HA! A misspelling in my comment! WITH NO EDIT FUNCTION! AAAAAAARRRRGH!
I can’t see it!
At the Tackleford Cormorant in the period currently being rerun on GoComics, the editing process is… Savage.
Another option would be to put a “Cast” page on the website, so that anyone who wonders “Who’s Mildred?” can hop over there for an introduction. I don’t remember whether you used to have one of those before the website got rebuilt.
Are the two d:s in overddrethed part of her lisp?
This was just a classic Allison typo
She’s speaking Welsh.
Not enough Ys.
It’s the Welsh spelling.
Ah! That explains the double panel in my feed last night – https://hachyderm.io/deck/@jwallison@mastodon.art/113382107986524746 – I’d wondered why it had two copies of this page (and the next page! – SHHHH!) checked when I saw this comment and one copy has the typo, the other has it fixed. Guessing releasing the fixed page tripped up the posting software somehow.
Save your copy now, one day the Overddrethed Mildred will be worth as much as an Inverted Jenny[1] as they carefully download it on Antiques Road show. “If you’d kept it in the original RSS feed – it could have been as much as fifty thousand pounds. But without that, I’d value it about tuppence, but still a marvelous thing to remember your grandfather by”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_Jenny
Thank you for pointing this out, Barrington. The Mastodon plugin definitely misbehaves!
Aww, this just makes me miss Shawna…
Mildred looks a bit like a blonde Morticia in that last panel.
At this rate maybe we can hope for Shauna by Christmas!
Dead & Breakfast is a tremendous mystery story title. I WANT TO SEE IT!
A bit of the plot wound up in a Steeple story so it needs some surgery but it can still reëmerge, fear not
I was going to say, if it never amounts to anything else, Dead & Buried is at least a cracking title.
it seems ominous, that Mildred, who although nominally sensible has an extremely wide mischievous streak, should first meet the G-man when he is in such an innovative state. Almost like a strange and volatile combination must ensue.
It really is good to see Mildred. I don’t think I realized how much I missed her.
Glarb has left his disruption too late. The creation of this powerful solving nexus means that all nearby mysteries have spontaneously solved themselves. Sadly, the last table at Lottie’s restaurant has just been taken by a party comprising Amelia Earhart, Lord Lucan, Ambrose Bierce and Judge Crater.
Mildred reminds me of a girl I was friends with in high school a lifetime ago. A girl I should have pursued more intently. Then again, she was far too fine for the likes of me.