He’s just a cool, chill guy
Options is a real British supermarket standby, the hot chocolate drink you can enjoy between meals without ruining your appetite. I mean, it’s still full of sugar… but not as much sugar.
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Do foxes get into people’s bins often in the UK?
Also, I wonder if Lottie is thinking of the sales rep being a possible lead.
Urban foxes love going thru my neighbours’ bins after they’ve had a party.
That’s a very entertaining ambiguous pronoun antecedent.
Those foxes really know how to party.
Often? If you have a bin that doesn’t shut they’ll get in. A friend gets eggs delivered and forgot to put the box out, and a fox came by and ate them.
The real menaces around here on bin day are seagulls. If someone leaves out a bin bag, they’ll stab it open and then hiss at you as you try and get by on the pavement. I don’t want your rubbish gull!
I was mostly surprised it would be foxes, rather than raccoons. However, I have now done some googling, and see that raccoons are not ubiquitous in the UK the way they are in the US.
The More You Know…
Raccoons are native to North America. Not saying that some idiot wouldn’t have tried to introduce them to the UK, but hoping that they didn’t.
No raccoons in the UK. It’s not as “cool” as it used to be to introduce invasive species. I believe a plan has recently begun here to eventually eradicate grey squirrels using a “contraceptive hazelnut paste”.
https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/blog/squirrel-contraceptives#:~:text=The%20government%20of%20the%20United,of%20UK%20gray%20squirrel%20control.
Contraceptive Hazelnut Paste – the brand new album by No Raccoons.
Wait… so a hazelnut paste has to be SPECIFICALLY LABELED as “contraceptive” to be effective? (Stares from empty Nutella jar to the faces of my many children, then back to empty Nutella jar) Okay, that explains a lot.
I live on the east coast of the US and thought our seagulls were troublesome until a trip to Scotland where I literally saw one trying to murder another in an alley before it got chased off.
In my neck of the woods we have metal locks on our bins so bears can’t pry or bash them open. Black, brown, occasionally grizzly. **blows on fingernails**
“Kind of interesting”, is it? Can this be the beginning of the long awaited Lottie romance arc?
Really a good way to start. Lottie’s smile is so cute thinking about him.
Or a ploy to make Gunnm jealous?
Glenn does seem to be looking slightly askance at Lottie finding the cool, chill guy kind of interesting. But they’re not going to be the David and Maddie of the 2020s without a little sexual tension, are they?
Moonlighting strangers who just met on the way
He is clearly under consideration….
Let’s see… a guy pushing hot chocolate powder to an establishment where only “artisan” coffee is sold… comes by often… gives Lottie a catering-sized box of his merch… free…
Naw, nothin’ there.
I think Lottie’s radar needs some more recalibration. She seems to have it set to X-ray vision.
X-Rays are practically on the other side of the electromagnetic spectrum from radar!
If these are the effects the Options give you… I want to try it! Or maybe that interesting guy is giving Lottie some weird things to help her develop her superpowers. As that last, powerful, panel seems to suggest.
I honestly feel this way about Vietnamese instant coffee Vinacafe. I had to go cold turkey. It was quite difficult.
What’s this now? Vietnamese instant???? Uh ohhhhhh….
I’m really enjoying this comic, its showing Lottie growing and changing but without losing that which made her interesting
I’m just now realizing that I’ve been hearing Lottie’s voice lately as a young Rosalind Russell (with her Transatlantic accent adjusted significantly eastward).
I respect that Lottie is not above convenience coffee (or whatever that is). She knows what’s good, and she knows it doesn’t matter.
Instant hot chocolate powder!
Ok, ok, NOW I’m with you. Can’t stand any type of coffee, but hot chocolate? Gimme! Nice to be learning all these UK brands, too.
Indeed. We could all take a cue from Lottie on such matters.
Final panel IS AMAZING
Agreed. The coloring in these first two pages already has me impressed.
I concur. Something about that panel seems reminiscent of classic 60s Italian horror.
My idea was that while Lottie is mentally recalibrating from detective to pure solver, the world almost rebuilds around her. And obviously I am always up for a bit of Dario Argento action!
That’s kind of Sherlock-Holmsey (CBatch version) almost!
Before I read the notes about British branding, I thought for a second that Glyn was getting addicted to lowercase-o “options”, to which my response was, “Yes, you totally can, it leads to a downward spiral of paralysis of choice, and STOP PEERING INTO MY SOUL, GUY IN A WEB COMIC.”
John Allison peers into all of our souls.
Not my black and midnight soul. When you stare into the abyss I’ll be right there staring back at you.
My wife and I stayed in a hotel in London where we could watch a fox from our window that had apparently mad its home on the roof of the building opposite.
And instead of mints on our pillows, the staff had left us a scouring pad in the window sill. It was all very romantic.
I feel like foxes there are like squirrels here. People from away think our big squirrels are so neat but really they’re rats with furry tails that climb trees. While here, foxes are cute and rare and special, in the UK they are bin-digging pests. HUH.
For those of us who live in rural areas, though, foxes are nowadays a rarity. (It used to be the opposite, of course.) If we’re driving down some quiet rural single-track road, and spot a fox, we shout, “look! A fox!” and everyone in the car gets their phone out to take a photo.
But the rural seagulls are just as bad as the urban ones. One year, they nested on our roof, and attacked all our customers as they tried to get from their cars to our back door, so we had to rush outside and hold a broomstick overhead to stop them divebombing us. They did draw blood once.
Alfred Hitchcock approves of ally’s post.
We still have foxes around. There are at least two living near my mom’s house that I frequently see when driving home at night, and there are others in the neighborhood. We’ve had them living under the barn some years. There were a couple of years they were raising kits… we’d be looking out the kitchen window at lunchtime and there’d be fox kits playing in the driveway.
Currently it’s woodchucks under the barn, though. I’d rather have the foxes… they didn’t dig holes everywhere. Though they did have an annoying habit of leaving carrion lying around. One spring I found the head of what I think was either a calf or a small deer behind the barn, which I assume the foxes dragged in. I don’t know where they got it. I don’t think they’re big enough to have taken it down themselves.
I’m down with grey squirrels, though I’ve given up on trying to put a bird feeder out after the squirrels got mad that it was empty and knocked it down and chewed holes in it. Red squirrels we try to trap and relocate, because we’ve had problems several times with them getting into the house and chewing. I had to armor the bottom of my cellar door with aluminum flashing because a red squirrel was getting into the cellar somehow and then trying to chew his way under the door into the main house. I think a hawk finally got him, though.
Haven’t had any trouble with gulls, even though there’s an island just offshore that hosts literally thousands of them. It’s just a bedroom community; they commute elsewhere for their raiding. Though there was one summer they got a plague, and there were literally dead and dying seagulls falling from the sky.
I was trying to revise the lyrics to “Fox on the Run” (by Sweet) to “Fox in a Wheelie Bin” but there are too many syllables. Didn’t work for “Fox on the Run” by The Country Gentlemen either.
Maybe Fox in the Snow by Belle & Sebastian? “When the world’s looking black and blue, it’s not as if they’re paying you. Fooooooxxxxxxx in the bin…”
“Fox in the bin”
Thank you for that explanation, the first and last panels make some kind of sense but read entirely differently if you don’t realize “Options” here is a proper noun.
I think my supermarket only ever got mint and caramel Options, not what appears to be hallucinogenic class-A drug flavour.
I think Twinings must keep the class-A variant quiet, for special customers only. It’s not even on their website: https://twinings.co.uk/collections/options-hot-chocolate
Looking closely at the box, I now see it is labeled as “Options”. Missed that the first time.
https://www.gocomics.com/bad-machinery/2017/02/14
When you get a sniff of something weird… you go after it without bathing?
Because the non-weird scents would alert the weird to your presence? I think that tracks…
I think they both got ‘the taste’ on the first sip. “It’s not quite coca-cola, if you know what we mean!”