A new Solver comic begins on Monday, and brings with it new intrigue, new faces, and new names for poor Glenn Durgan, who will never know peace so long as he keeps company with Ms C. Grote.
The Urn
Welcome back, and thank you for your patience. Your reward: the X-Files. My $3-and-up Patreon subscribers can enjoy the whole eighth Solver chapter in PDF format right now. Everybody else can proceed at a stately pace, meeting here to discuss the strategies that will carry us through the next seven weeks.
Lottie is, in real terms, too young for this show, but I find it hard to believe that she hasn’t sought it out. It’s very relevant to her interests.
Do you remember Fluke Man? The X-Files’ most loveable character. Here’s a picture of him that I drew eight long years ago.
I’ve spent a lot of time in recent months learning to identify the flags of the world. I can tell which is which between Kiribati, Uganda and Papua New Guinea’s flags. Is that a bird on Papua New Guinea’s flag? Or a moth gone mad? Either way I like it a lot. But I have no idea exactly which national flag Sir Robert Mapplethorpe is planting in the first panel. It might just feature his family crest.
While I am improving on flag identification, there are swathes of world flaggery that remain hard for me to pin down. A lot of flags are some stripes with a star in the middle. I’ve yet to come up with a system to nail down these stripy mysteries.
Death, as always, marked by the manifestation of a glowing, floating skull. Look, I don’t make the rules. We will all be glowing, floating skulls one day. Get used to it.
At last, the opportunity to use the word “rubric” in a comic. There’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do.
High action, the way you like it. I really had to learn how to draw a bull the day I made this comic.
Lottie’s hand symbol indicates “two horns” while Glenn’s indicates “three diners”. The presence of a head between the digital gestures introduces all manner of new meaning.
Claire takes a very real joy from participating in Lottie’s mystery solving process. It’s written all over her face.
Record Collector is a real shop, I spent a lot of money in there when I was a student. I would wile away the hours in the second hand CD bins, a game of discovery (and bargain hunting) that went on for the three years I lived nearby.