The hump
Old Stoneface disappoints. Dean is a classic old man before his time. When I was a student, there were a few of these entities. We all know one or two of them. They seemed old when they were 21, but as they get older, they simply become more themselves. And more you becomes you! But look at all those new friends at the bus stop! Hopefully, eventually we’ll get to meet them all.
We decimalised in 1967 in NZ so apart from seeing some of the few old coins that continued with new values (shilling = 10 cents) I had no experience with pre-decimals
I did find the other day the receipt for the ocean liner my parents took to Rhodesia in the ’50s which cost 47£ 12s 6p
Be careful writing such magic spells. You might summon one of the Lovecraftian Great Old Ones.
Decimalization seems like kind of a shame. The old British system sounded like a riot. We are all poorer for the decline in use of the word “thruppence”, and for God’s sake, Old Britaine even had a florin coin.
It was a shame in that it took place very close to the advent of computerisation that would have made all the difficult stuff with the old money trivial to deal with, interest calculations and so on. Thruppence would be 1.2p though so falling out of use by now; even the half crown would be basically shrapnel. Could have dropped pence altogether by now, I guess, and just had £1 = 20s.
And the whole term “tuppenny upright” is just granddad’s fantasy of the olden days.
6d not 6p (£47/12/6 would be the commonest way of writing it though)
I’ve honestly never written it before yesterday. In the ocean liner receipt it was written in full…
d, short for denarius ( spelling? ) the basic unit for Roman coins.
“Half a denari for me bloody life story!?”
You wrote it again! You wrote it again! Now the Great Old Ones will be on us for sure.
I didn’t know that Rhodesia had a sea coast.
Did NZ get a jingle to publicise their conversion the way that Australia had the previous year? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtyNLwqljzI
And of course, it’s the 60th anniversary in about 4 weeks – eek!
Very awesome cat in panel 3. It looks like one that would guard the field.
Yes, for some reason the detail that caught my eye were the orange cat, and the brown parcel leaning against the bus stop glass (I hope that passenger doesn’t forget it!)
Yes, I noticed the cat, too. And, there’s a cat on this issue’s cover! (https://badmachinery.com/comic/2026-01-02/) Not the same cat, though.
It also looks very much like the cat very early on in the first Bad Machinery stories Lottie and Shauna illustrated for their public service school project.
Are you saying I can only draw one cat?
To be fair, many actual cats look essentially the same from this distance / at this resolution.
My current cat “Fergus the Kitten” is special. He’s an asymmetrical grey tabby with a great white spot offset on one side of his back and a sort of tawny beard spot. And half a white necktie, if that makes any sense. He’s a vicious wee beastie, but sweet in his own way. He likes to crawl under my duvet and cuddle up against my back or leg when I sleep.
At LEAST two, counting the one on the cover!
Oh no John, I know for a fact you can draw many cats. It’s just that this one felt very reminiscent to me.
A rogue Ronald Searle moggie!
I vaguely remember decimalisation. We had a toy cash register (like this one from Casdon https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/w70AAeSw47RowXOf/s-l1600.jpg) with plastic coins so we could learn to add with new money, but since I was too young to know how to add with old money, that didn’t really make a difference. We just used the old coins for setting off caps from cap guns, and I still have the burn on my thumb all these decades later.
As far as I was I was concerned the big change in class was going from plasticine to Cuisenaire Rods.
Oh, that cash register rings a very strong bell. Like you I never really knew the old money but grew up in the era of decimalisation and had a toy like that.
So, the girls have achieved their 20s, then? Time flies. It seems only yesterday they were tiny children learning the dangers of being associated with Lenard Fishmen.
Lottie’s still 19 for another seven or so months. Claire’s 19 or 20; we’ve never learned when her birthday is. Shauna turned 20 last month, and Mildred the month before. Sonny’s 19; his birthday’s not for another month (Christmas Day! because of course it is). Jack is possibly 50 now? Otherwise in the same category as Claire and Linton, who’s also 19–20 depending on an unknown birthday.
Of course Jack is a variable depending if he can somehow get removed from the 1990s/early Aughts and returned to proper Space/Time.
In a surprising twist, it turns out that Dean is in fact Fizz’s old baby.
It’s okay, Clare. Dean probably just thought you were asking him because he’s an expert on many different topics, and not because you thought he personally remembered the time period. The reason he’s mad at you is something entirely different.
Yes. Because he talked with Clippy.
Dean definitely gives vibes of having strong opinions about decimalization (and about pretty much everything else).
He’s of the opinion it should have been hexadecimalization.
I had a “3C” birthday a little while back because it felt much more friendly than the decimal equivalent
If you’re into themed parties, for your next birthday you can have everyone wearing 3D glasses.
When I mentioned “a little while back” I may have understated; my 3D birthday has been and gone a little while back
Dean giving two simultaneous cold shoulders.
It’s a good thing Gelfling isn’t there too, or he wouldn’t have enough shoulders.
Perhaps there is a pork shoulder in one of his grocery sacks? It would probably be cold.
So giving someone the cold shoulder is actually a very nice gift… good to know
In the USA, people in their 30s, 40s, 50s. and so on attend college (going “back to school” to earn a degree) and it’s not considered a big deal. I guess it’s different in the UK?
Mature students were certainly a thing at my (first) university, but that was twenty years ago and also something in which the institution specialised. There have always been a few older folks on every course of study I’ve taken, more so the PGCE than anything else. I was one of the older folks on my PhD programme, surrounded by these bright young things fresh out of their MA and convinced one of the two academic jobs in the country could be theirs, and I felt the institution was aligned with gently disillusioning them at the cost of everything else. Lots of mandatory “transferable skills” workshops.
All of which is to say, in my experience retraining to a new profession often brings people back to Big School, but being in it for the sake of learning is unusual.
Also, our ‘steemed author’s description of Dean as “Blue Harbour at Marks & Spencers,” i.e. a young man whose dress sense is the other side of middle age, has taken up permanent residence in my vocabulary. I felt personally indicted by that considering where my early teaching wardrobe came from. Yet another way in which, to my consternation, I am the Dean Thompson of my own life’s narrative.
There were certainly mature students when I was a young student, Ronald, but Dean wasn’t a mature student, he just dressed like someone 20-30 years older. This was inadvertently exacerbated in his early appearances by the organic style of Giant Days’ brush inking (issues 13-34) which took some of the sharpness out of Max Sarin’s pencils. If you see him in later issues where Max is inking, he’s not as jowly.
And Jonathan, we all dock at the Blue Harbour eventually – the only question is when.
Is the Freemans catalogue still going?
Blue Harbour kind of sounds like the Grey Havens in Middle-earth.
It’s a grey haven all right
Wait! This means Dean knows that Lottie is friends with Esther? Remembering the old, peculiar relationship Dean and Esther used to have, I’ve always hypnotised his reaction to this would have be explosive.
He potentially could know this but I don’t think he does. Dean doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the old Giant Days days.
It would probably be even worse if he knew what Esther did for a living now
New friends at the stop! Bus bottle arc tbd?
Old pennies were abbreviated d because the more logical p was used for the new pennies that replaced them and in Britane, time goes backwards as everybody knows. This has been your free history lesson – if you’re not satisfied with it, I shall happily refund you every d you will have paid for it in the future (or past if you’re in Britane).
That definitely makes more sense than pence being indicated by ‘d’ because it’s short for denarius.
Both Dean Thompson and McGraw gave the impression of being older than the other Giant Days characters. In McGraw’s case, I think it was his moustache, which was far more powerful than the standard weedy student version.
It’s also his whole dad vibes: his main interests are handyman staples , the mustache as you pointed out. He only doesn’t get it as bad as Dean because his face was just a touch more youthful. He has the body of a 19 year old but the face of your dad.
I have somehow managed to project an air of vague mid-thirtiesness since I was about sixteen years old. It’s getting even stranger now that I’m on the far side of that age.
I’ve had kind of the same experience, except I had a vague 20-something about me until the last five or six years. Now I have a vague 40-something dad-who-works-in-the-building-center look about me. I think it’s because I’ve lost all colour in my hair. Not grey, but transparent. For a long time I got by with a golden strawberry blond colour, at least in bright light, but that’s gone now.
In reality I’m pushing 60.
If someone called me Mister like that I would also not assume we were close friends, regardless of the age difference. Is that a UK thing still? Surely not. I know Americans can be weird with their Sir and Ma’am, but I thought you’d progressed more than that.
(Yes, I am Scandinavian, why do you ask)
It’s not uncommon here for a friend to call you Mister [Surname] in an affectionate way.
Thanks for the clarification there, I just assumed that it was part and parcel with the later revelation that Claire thinks he’s a much older man in his 50s and was being respectful. This as an American who is used to that being the expectation growing up from people who were old enough to be my parents age.
I think the only people in NZ who still call a man “Mister …” are hospital receptionists directing patients to an exam room and, as Mr A already mentioned, friends addressing friends, usually after an extended period of separation
I have always loved the way Agent Smith addressed Neo as “Mister Anderson” in The Matrix; Hugo Weaving had a way of conveying so much in those two words
Mister [First Initial Of Surname] doesn’t seem uncommon, either. So, for instance, Mr. E is Lottie’s first love.
I wondered how Lottie knew about Dean as she didn’t meet him during her visit, but the more I think about it the more it makes sense. Dean isn’t exactly a subtle person and Lottie and Esther talk recently. If he came up during their vampire adventure or in modern day in text, things would click. And similarly Lottie is likely smart enough to never speak her friends name. Which given her lack of tact says a lot .
In fairness, I am “about” 45 and I vaguely remember decimalisation, but only insofar as the Old Money™ was still hanging around, just with new names.
I developed male pattern baldness starting in my late 20’s. I learned later that my friends’ “secret name” for me was “Sydney” – because my bald spot was shaped like Australia.
I have my revenge, though, now that my bald spot, though it now resembles more like Pangaea, is currently more age-appropriate. Because nowadays, due to what I consider my “Yout’ful Demeanour”, people consistently peg me as being 10 years younger than I actally am!
Ugh.
I’m in my fifties, and I don’t remember decimalisation. I do remember 5p’s with HALF SHILLING written on them though.
I was 25 when I finally got round to going to Uni, so I was techinically a Mature Student (although I wasn’t very mature.)
Dammit John, I’m starting to get the horrible feeling I’m Dean Thompson…