This is not happening
We are up and running. Oasis’ Be Here Now is a record that people of a certain age remember for two things: its omnipresence, and its tedium. When it received a 20th anniversary reissue in 2017, Noel Gallagher remixed one song, then admitted that he had lost the will to live and left the rest to posterity.
This story will last for eight weeks. If you want to read it all now, it’s available for $3/month (and up) Patreon subscribers.
RELATED: if you want to read my beloved “teen Shelley” miniseries from 2014, EXPECTING TO FLY, it’s available on my Gumroad.
PART 1 || PART 2
SHE’S ADORABLE
If this lad finds Shelley such a formidable opponent, just wait until he meets Bruno.
This can’t be happening… or can it?
YES!! I’ve long waited for a return to Shelley’s teen years and it looks like we’re getting an homage to Britpop as well!!
Is this teen Shelley or young adult post-grad Shelley? This dude seems to be in law school and she is living with roommates. For what I can tell so far.
I’m inclined to think this might be college-age Sophie after having read the comic in Patreon.
* college-age Shelley.
This is most likely during Shelley’s undergraduate days, so she’ll be in her late teens and living at University, with unfettered access to alcohol and her fellow hormonal youth. If the course is the same shape as the one I didn’t finish (I switched to archaeology when I realised I’d never be able to cross-examine anyone who cried on the stand,) contract law probably means second year undergrad, so 18 or 19.
Note, however, that Shelley is studying in the UK, so it’s likely that her undergraduate degree will be a batchelor of laws (LLB), followed by a one year bar course and famously one case of the one year pupilage, rather than the three-year postgraduate programme of a US law school.
By the same token, under UK law, Shelley and all of her immediate peers are newly minted to full drinking age, which could explain a lot about both lads on this page.
Oh very helpful. Thanks!
Oh Oasis, taking up way to much time on the alt rock radio station in Chicago I listened to quite a bit at that time.
Panel 1 falling flannel from the gif?
I was Team Blur, but mainly because Modern Life Is Rubbish was the best Kinks album since The Jam’s Setting Sons
I like that John uses a different lettering style than on Solver.
The real boob here is randy Andy.
So who is the distraught lad in the first panel? That room looks a lot like some crummy motel rooms I’ve stayed in.
I imagine we’ll find out soon enough.
Yes but that’s never stopped us speculating on such things before. Isn’t that half the fun?
To my eyes it looks like a Night Creeper… or perhaps a distressed Night Hero?
Last week they announced that Noel and Liam had “patched things up” and threatened us with an Oasis reunion next year, and I lost a certain amount of will to live.
Shelley is a cornflake girl?
And she’s also a little earthquake.
Interesting way to start a story. Love the drama.
Yeah, funny timing on the Oasis with the news out today. No way you could have known when you drew this. Cosmic.
John A is in tune with the zeitgeist, with his finger on the pulse, his ear to the ground and his nose to the grindstone! Though not all at the same time, obviously.
Remember when John finished off the Bad Machinery run with his deft skewer of Michael Jackson, and Michael promptly dropped dead from shame?
(I may be embellishing the facts slightly)
Strangely, this very storyline comes up in the notes under tomorrow’s comic. I was a few pages into publishing this, the final Scary Go Round story when my then girlfriend woke me up around midnight. “John John,” she said, shaking me, “MICHAEL JACKSON’S DEAD.”
I’m not ashamed to say I waited outside a record store (not very long though) to get my copy of Be Here Now on release day before I rushed to the uni where my summer job was. I hurt my hand that day, air guitaring with such vigor my knuckle collided hard with the desk. It did not yield but neither did my bones.
Only LP I ever hurried down to the store to buy the second the doors opened was The Pretenders’ first album.
I’d already bought all of their import 45s in advance of the album, as the small Columbia, SC, record store across the street from campus had been evangelizing them for months, ever since “Stop Your Sobbing”
Is that Hollywood superstar and Ramona’s second evil ex-boyfriend Lucas Lee?
John, thank you for setting a story in this time and place, with so many piercingly accurate details! I’ve read the entire thing on Patreon, but it’s lovely to be able to read all the comments and asides, day by day. I’m listening to Oasis and Verve for full immersion…
I am now intrigued as to what Oasis would sound like without the Beatles back catalogue to draw on (as I assume it was more or less erased in “Destroy History”). I say intrigued. What I mean is very very apprehensive.
It’d sound a lot more like Freddie & The Dreamers…
I have a confession to make: I’ve never heard it.
OK Computer, sure. Surfacing. U2’s Pop, even. And Jagged Little Pill was still in heavy rotation. But I missed just about everything Oasis on its first go-around, and never felt the pull to check it out in the intervening quarter-century. Am I missing out?
To my mind, the britpop album that really holds up today is Elastica
RSS is being weird again. The new comics are not appearing on https://badmachinery.com/feed/ in Inoreader, but the same feed is working okay in Thunderbird.
… and today it’s back.