Bombs away!
Another glimpse of Claire’s many admirers. She’s a very popular bug! I’m sure we’ll see more of them.
Bad Machinery
New comics by John Allison
Another glimpse of Claire’s many admirers. She’s a very popular bug! I’m sure we’ll see more of them.
In the words of Joe Jackson, is she really going out with him?
And does he know?
Do they both know?
I don’t think they know but lottie’s starting to guess.
it’s purely natural. They’ve gone on dates, but would never call them dates. They are associates, perhaps long term… perhaps permanent. Benefits packages have yet to be discussed.
I really, really hope that all of Claire’s non-Mikey admirers simply didn’t notice the falling bricks, and they weren’t actually willing to sacrifice Claire’s life just to avoid jealousy.
Very glad Mike didn’t respected the pact. Also, thanks to him seeing everything Claire will know it wasn’t an accident but an attempted murder. Evilottie may have done her first big mistake.
Unless the witnesses are positive that they saw Lottie dropping those bricks.
Lottie can easily prove she was nowhere near Sheffield at the time, though.
Our ne’er-do-well has revealed that she changed guises, if the previous scene is to be regarded as indicative.
Well THAT was a close call! If not for her many admirers no one would have pushed that envelope to BAWWWWK her, BAWWWWK her good!
Technically Mike never agreed to the pact, so it shouldn’t be considered binding. Also, I very much like his 1970s computer programmer vibe.
The pact was to not fight over Claire. Mikey saved her life, he didn’t fight over her.
It’s hilarious that they get Glurm’s name wrong.
And nationality. I blame Lottie for the former and Doppelgröte for the latter.
I like the way the diagonal pipes on the scaffolding emphasize the DIVE action in the last panel.
“BAWWWWK!”?
I see we have a chicken Little, complete with falling sky!
Mike’s reflexes and acceleration from a standing start are extremely impressive. Good show.
I’ll say! If that’s Negalottie’s leg in panel 1, the distance from where she would have dropped the bricks to the top of Claire’s head would be 5.5 meters or so. They would have been falling for barely over a second. Mike has been drinking his gamer juice.
Unless Mike actually watched Negalottie lift the bricks up and divined her intentions before she dropped them? In which case he’s now a witness.
Mikes eyes do seem to be focused upwards towards Evil Lottie in the first panel.
Plus, the fact that someone could be heard shouting “Bombs away!” at that moment might be a bit of a tip-off.
I can image it happening in slow motion. Like the Six Million Dollar Man. Time slows down at moments like this. Mike crying Claaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaire as he lunges slowly forward.
you too can learn these secret super powers by becoming a parent
Claire’s superpower is that everyone loves her.
Also, pyrokinesis.
Amongst her powers are such elements as:
Nobody expected that.
Glenn would make a passable Cardinal Fang.
SAVED… by the POWER OF LOVE
Gotta respect Claire’s game. Esther only had one nerd with a hopeless crush on her. Claire has her own pack of them and a possible boyfriend and as a bonus seems genuinely oblivious. Like ed they seem like good lads, if a bit more self aware.
It’s still jarring just how….close this was. John isn’t above putting his cast in danger, see the climax of the case if the severed alliance id forgotten about till recently reruns, but it’s so simple.
Unrelated but my giant days retrospective is still up. Part 2 coming next month likely early. I almost had to cancel it but a friends sponsoring it
Phew, if John had just been slightly less precise with his drawings, Claire might actually be dead by now!
Let’s hope she hasn’t suffered a concussion. Those pain stars are ominous.
Speaking of Claire’s admirers, you know who I’m curious about? Colm. Wondering how that chap is doing.
Me too. I imagine he’s probably fine (relatively speaking) and hopefully getting treatment.
He’s got three children to keep him busy.
Same. I hope we pop in on him soon. One fun thing about solver is it wouldn’t be too hard to set up a trip to Ireland for a client and he left around I think …14? So it’d be interesting to see what the years have done to him. I mean the mystery kids had a nasty dissolution we just heard about. I can’t imagine what several years away after a painful breakup has done to him. He could be healthily moved on or he could try to bend glemp in half.
Colm was 16 in “Missing Piece”, when we saw him last. He’s a year older than the mystery kids.
Got held back a year when he moved from Ireland, as I recall.
Thank you. It’s hard to keep track of the ages sometimes as I’m not sure if John kept up with the two semesters and a summer pattern after volume 6. Also forgot he was a year older. So that was still 5 years.
The pattern kind of broke down after “Modern Men” (spring of their third year). The summer after third year was only filled retroactively by “The Big Hiatus”, and the autumn of fourth year was the Bobbins story “Into the Woods”.
“Space is the Place” and “Missing Piece” actually overlap in the spring of fourth year — Blossom’s coup happened while Shauna and Lottie were in Wales — and “Severed Alliance” picks up a few days after “Missing Piece”, and ends with the first day of fifth year.
And the Bobbins story “Hard Yards”, in which the kids participated, covers the term of Shelley’s pregnancy, and then a bit, and runs parallel to the last three Bad Machinery stories.
If you click on my name, there’s a timeline, as best I can work it out.
You are doing the lord’s work there, John!! Amazing stuf!
Maybe Colm and Blossom are happily married, and raising a brood of super-strong giants.
Hmmm. I wonder if a posse computatis might not form and give (probably futile) pursuit?
They’ll be useful for following her tracks in data.
In those key moments after Claire has been saved they are all no doubt racing to help her to her feet and any other way possible! Meanwhile the brick-dropper will vanish.
Do we know this Mike character? Could this be an Evil Lottie false flag action? “Mike” steals Claire from Lottie through their heroic action. Is that beard firmly attached?
If Bad Machinery were Mission Impossible, we would soon see the reveal that this Mikey is actually the real Lottie (the disguise has already slipped a bit with getting Golem’s name wrong). Then we would get a plothole coverup montage.
The real Lottie’s currently in Glasgow with Shanna and Linton.
Shauna. I hate typing on my phone.
That’s why the plothole coverup montage would be necessary!
~meet-cute~
WHEW!!!
Australian?!
Don’t make me tap the confusingly similar flag.
🇦🇺 🇳🇿 A bit similar, perhaps.
Claire is rightly beloved by all!!!!!
Apart from Evilottie of course!!! Boooooooo!!!!!!
Once again Evilottie appears to actually exist in monochrome. Have we ever seen her depicted in full colour?
Whence Negalottie?
Her leg seems to be apparent, in colour, at the top of the scaffolding in panel 1.
I think the lack of color is more how she sees the world. In this panels where we’re seeing things more-or-less from her point of view, there’s almost no color.
Either that or this proves the theory that she’s actually time-traveling Cilla Black.
This just goes to show that *nobody* gets the drop on Little Claire.
I thought for a second that P3 was where the four lads made some sort of modern equivalent of a blood pact by dropping their phones together. I guess those gray slabs weren’t phones but something much deadlier
That’s not Mikey, that’s a young Ian McNaught-Davis!
Love the lettering on that smash, really emphasizes the impact.
Actually, just looking at the impact zone and the bricks it would be more like THUB-THUB-THUB-B-B-THUB!
The more I see Evilottie in black and white the more I wonder if it’s someone from The Case of the Forked Road – though I don’t remember who our antagonists were in that one.
I like that this operates on Crusader Kings III rules where if someone is really into you they have a chance to prevent one assassination attempt
If it is CK3 rules, the next time we check in on Mike he will be a one-legged flagellant drunkard.
Mikey showing excellent form in the four-metre dash-and-dive. A shoo-in for the British Olympic team.
If the Olympics had a “Saving an oblivious pedestrian from falling debris” event, I would watch the HECK out of that.
“Well, a very sad day here at the 2028 Games, with the elimination of both France and Kuwait, not to mention their respective oblivious pedestrians.”
I’m imagining that there’s this whole parallel harem romance comedy comic revolving around Claire, to which she is completely oblivious.
Oh, I would read that in a heartbeat. The friendship between her circle of admirers could only grow stronger from it.
Wait, are we ALL in love with Claire? I thought it was just me.
I told you she was a popular bug
And this is why you should never tit about near scaffolding…
Rats. That was supposed to be a stand-alone comment, not a reply.
John seems to like to draw bowled-over women:
https://www.gocomics.com/bad-machinery/2018/05/26
I won’t approve of any suitors for Claire until they see her true colors. Her bright red and orange fiery colors. (My approval is meaningless)
Claire is totally insulated from the world with headphones and mobile.
Double-plus-ungood-Lottie’s unintended consequence has saved Claire from being hit by a car and squashed like a popular bug.