I don’t know how to put this
When Claire finally came along, we have to imagine that the storeroom was running very low on raw materials, so they concentrated on finish rather than volume.
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Bad Machinery
New comics by John Allison
Claire doesn’t work in fire. She plays in fire.
I’m wondering what the troll is up to these days.
Fire walk with her!
Do we know his given name? This uncle Rob smells iffy.
That’s actually what got me wondering.
Rob Trollman.
I bet Colm fit in nicely to the family after he hit his growth spurt.
Growing up in New Zealand, Glenn would have encountered his share of burly rugby men. Claire’s brothers must be impressively Herculean.
I mean. he’s seen them from afar, sure. But I’d guess Glenn has done his best to avoid the actual company of any “coterie of Alphas” that enjoy chest-bumping. It’s really not his style.
So Claire’s the only one of the Little brood who’s actually, you know, little. I don’t know why I didn’t see that coming.
In another timeline, we could’ve gotten Claire Large
In ANOTHER another timeline, Claire would have been Wee Clarence, with Amazonian sisters.
Well there is Big Lindsay…
IIRC, she was “Small Lindsay” when she was younger, but I can’t remember which story, or even which comic, that came up in.
Flashback in the original Giant Days.
Claire McLargeHuge.
Is that a reference to Dr. McLargeHuge or to Big McLargeHuge?
Yes
Ah, you beat me to it.
You know they’re nicknamed Little Brad et.al. Robin Hood style.
It gets worse – the three brothers, taken as a whole, would be “the Little boys”.
These three seem strong, funny and full of love for their small sis. But they also seem like the kind of person who prefers to see her with someone like Colm, and not like Glenn. I wonder if the name of Claire’s old boyfriend will be mentioned during Christmas day.
It’ll be a Colm day in hell before they bring his name up again.
Reminds me of the Campbell Boys from “Haha You Clowns”
2 rotisserie chickens per brother, per meal. Gotta keep up those muscles!
I hope they have a Costco UK on this end of the Wen-Tac. That’s a lot of chickens.
When they were lads they ate 4 dozen eggs every morning to help them get large… which makes 12^2 eggs for the Little household per day, over 1000 per week! Plus a few sprinkled in there for the other members of the family as well…
12^2 eggs? That’s gross.
“Seven score and four eggs ago”? Why can’t you just say “this morning” like everyone else?
Don’t forget to mention to her brothers that you brought flowers, Glenn
That’ll show ’em
Flowers? If Glenn wanted to impress them he should have brought a C02 fire extinguisher.
So Claire is the only un-ironically named child in the Little Family?
It’s a little-known fact that in Oz, rotisserie chickens are known as munchikens.
I like seeing Claire getting handsy with Glerb in that last panel. You go, girl!
She kneads him so much!
The Glorm and Claire Midsommar arc should have been obvious so long ago.
I grew up in a firefighter family. Not as complete as that one though. It was a volunteer fire department, and my Grandfather was the fire chief. My Uncle and a couple of cousins were also firemen in the district. I never was, but I never really lived there as an adult. That said, pictures of us all standing together kinda look like the Little family. A friend of mine once saw a picture of us all and said, “Damn! Your family is all carved from oak stumps!” He’s not wrong.
I was just thinking how did such a small girl come from such a large family. But I suppose that authorial comment makes sense.
I’m hungry for the day when Claire’s affinity for pyrotechnics comes sparking back.
If Ed Gemmell can survive Nina’s family…
My grandfather was the fire chief of a wee town in the wilds of the Worcester Hills of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (God save it!). As the town remained un-burned-down, I consider his stint in the position as highly successful!
Funny that. In the 1950s and 60s my Grandfather owned a Shell Oil filling station in the town where he was also Fire Chief. Literally a block from the fire station. In 1969 he sold it for various reasons that didn’t turn out so well. Two years later it burned to the ground and the new owners got nothing. He was still Fire Chief at the time, but I don’t blame him for that fire. It was probably Little Claire getting her revenge via time machine. (It couldn’t have been me. I was only 4 years old.)
Given the that the picture of the fireplace on the previous page has only 3 stockings, I hope that Claire’s in nailed in the part of the mantel that wasn’t in the picture.
The family shows their distain for her non-fire career choices in subtle ways.
There’s easily room for a 4th stocking off-panel.
Claire is rocking that outfit, I must say. Ygln doesn’t stand a chance!
She is an adorable little bug.
Her lisp has mysteriously disappeared…
Look again, Ronald.
Unless a rotitherie chicken is a rotisserie chicken given as a tithe, she only lisped “officer” and “rotisserie”.
It makes sense her lisp would be relatively low, she tends to lisp more when she’s stressed and here she has no real reason to be so.
I’m sure after the overwhelming presence of three ripped brothers, Glenn would find the average softness of the Mystery Boys welcoming.
John, you seem to be craving rotisserie chicken.
Is this going to be like the time Ed Gemmell went to Australia and met lots of manly men?
As little like it as I can manage or it’s probably time to wind things up, right? I don’t remember much of what happened in that story apart from the very long sausage and the hooning around.
So, if fire’s not Claire’s thing, at least not in the more conventional sense of the phrase, what is? What’s she going to college to get a degree in? I’m sure that’s been mentioned any number of times but I don’t recall it. 😐
She’s studying sociology at Sheffield. Previously she was at the London School of Economics, but apparently economics is not Claire’s thing.
Ah, Sociology. If my memory of my Uni days serves me well, she’s in for quite a nasty surprise with statistics in that field. Still a big upgrade over LSE, but not always as much as she might have thought…
I don’t think the maths were Claire’s problem with LSE. It seems to have been that she was studying economics with a bunch of people who study economics. She was way down in London, didn’t seem to have any friends there, or anybody she wanted to be friends with. At Sheffield, she’s a popular bug, with not only Lottie and Gallant, but also Haz and the Clairem.
Pyrology?
I tried to get into that program but it was full!
It’s a hot subject.
BTW, why are so many of us being assigned the same icon? Thanks.
If you haven’t got a gravatar (see note above “Post Comment” button), you get Bobby Problems.
I got 99 problems, but a Bobby avatar ain’t one
I think Bobby finally managed to push me into getting that gravatar I’ve been considering for several years.
It was Danny Wilcox that finally convinced me to stop playing avatar roulette and get a gravatar. I used Philémon the cat from Frivolesque for a while, but Frivolesque has now been “coming back soon” for five years, so I switched to the Selkie Daddy, who has a very strong physical resemblance to me in any case. Though I have more gray in my pelt these days.
(It was him or Brian, and I don’t wear glasses.)
I had the same one for months. Now it’s just not there. Shrug. Thanks for the reply.
For the last several months, the site has been using as default avatar for anyone without an actual gravatar a variety of pseudorandom robot avatars that are in one of the default sets the WordPress comments system provides. They’re not actually random; they’re selected by a hash of the provided email address, so you’ll always get the same one if you provide the same email. However in the last few days, John has switched it from using the robot avatars provided by WordPress to using a custom default avatar: to wit, Bobby Problems. Anyone who doesn’t have a gravatar now gets Bobby instead of a random robot (or, before that, Des).
I hope Claire re-cut those flowers before putting them in water… As the daughter of florists, I am paying way too much attention to things like that.
“ When Claire finally came along, we have to imagine that the storeroom was running very low on raw materials, so they concentrated on finish rather than volume.”
Wait… so, is the ‘storeroom’ Ma Little’s womb? Just want to be sure I’m following the metaphor here…
I think you have the gist of it correct.