Moon-centric Brits
One of the reasons I like writing Charlotte stories that they open up all sorts of peculiar notions to write about. She doesn’t think like anybody else, which leads to terms like “international nocturnes”. It’s a good mindset to write in.
A blessing for me, perhaps, but possibly a curse for poor Glenn (Glyn? Glemm? Gerg?) Durgan there.
Oh the infinite blessings of that sixth panel
Poor Glenn. He has the look of one who is trying to decide if this is all just a hallucination.
Gloom is feeling a sense of doom.
You can learn a lot about a person from their choice of reading material
Indeed. Unfortunately, I can’t make out what Gollum is reading.
“Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” by Grace Paley. (I could only make out some of the title, so I googled it.)
You’re clearly better at reading little squiggles than I. Even at maximum zoom, all I could work out was “Grace”, which wasn’t really enough to go on.
Been a lot of book placement this week. Breasts and Eggs last page, Noel Edmonds — Positively Happy the page before. This would probably tell me something about the respective characters if I’d ever read any of them.
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute By Grace Paley.
I particularly like how the street scene is desperately trying to cause paranoia but Lottie WILL HAVE NONE OF IT.
She grew up in Tackleford. Sheffield is going to have to try harder.
Lottie doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to her surroundings in the first four panels. Perhaps she should fear the night. But, then, why turn back?
Maybe British nights are better if you wear British Knights?
I love how grey is used here. Starting with being the only color and ending in being only in Lottie’s pants. So cinematic, sequences and energy. Lottie’s fearless walking in the night is so powerful! And Glenn… that guy is a mystery!
That was the last voice Ygln ever expected to hear. And it has chilled him to the bone!
The contrast between the Lotties of the final two panels: on the left, we see her slightly dazed/crazed, with grey bags under her eyes, clearly feeling the physical ramifications of her nocturnal shift. But on the right, as soon as she spots some other human on which to shine her glory, she is transformed, and seemingly fresh as a daisy. I love it so, so much.
John for some reason the end of the last Solver left me with the impression that Charlotte was going to join Claire as a student, attending uni. Did she just room with Claire to try something new and different?
Yes!
I don’t know, it just seems to me that trading a managerial position at a coffee shop for sitting around in laundromats in the middle of the night is not a step upward of any kind. Maybe that’s just me. But surely sitting around in laundromats doesn’t pay nearly as well?
It’s not classic Lottie, not zany enough, but it does feel like Lottie failing to make a plan and deciding to take action anyway
It is if you don’t want to spend the next several-few years working in a coffee shop! The best way to get sucked into a job you don’t like is by getting PROMOTED. (Nothing against coffee shops but Lottie? Come on.)
I thought this too, particularly with the parental send-off.
Wait a minute. Waaaait a minute. G in yet another city. It ain’t natural I tell you.
I enjoy how the purple puffer produces purple puffy sound effects.
I worked the Graveyard shift for a while (Midnight until 8:30) and on my nights off it was essentially impossible to sleep during the hours of darkness. It’s amazing how little there is to do between about 1:00 until 5:00. This was before video rental and when the local TV stations signed off at Midnight or 1:00 (I am old.) I took to taking long walks in the dark too, but I lived in a small rural town without anything resembling nightlife. Thank Buddha I don’t do that anymore.
Just to save others the wasted effort, that telephone number for Bubble Boyz does not seem to be valid. Or maybe it is actually a bar code…
It has too many digits, for a start. 0114 611 1111 would be a valid number but is in a range that is not yet allocated for use. 0114 496 0111 would be in the range “reserved for use in TV and radio drama programmes”, which is clearly off limits to webcomics.
I was assuming John chose a number with far too many ones on purpose, to make it obvious it was not a real phone number.
Actually I was wondering if it might be a homage to Mitch Hedberg. “If you are in the Sheffield area, press 1, and keep on pressing 1 until you hear someone say ‘Bubble Boyz’. Then you will know you have pressed enough 1s”
The return of the breakout character of the year! Glam Duranduran!
It feels so exciting to have created a character on a par with anyone Image Comics introduced in 1993. Glenn Durgan (Grem Darmok At The Gates Of Tanagra) is my Gen13, my Bloodshot, my Wild C.A.T.S
Your Shadowhawk!
Glenngarry Glenn Ross is a square, what is he doing in the all night laundromat? He’s not moon-centric, is he?
Honestly, Gonk kind of strikes me as someone who doesn’t really sleep.
Sorry to disappoint Lottie, but a lot of our casual potentially seedy all-night diners worthy of Edward Hopper paintings or Scorsese and Tarantino films are going by the wayside and the pandemic has only made it worse. Still we here in the States very much appreciate your Watchmen-esque ode to them. Also welcome back Glenn!
This is so sad!
There are still some holdouts, but an increasingly endangered species unless of course it’s a chain like Denny’s.
Thankfully, Denny’s restaurants are indestructible. They are the Scenes From A Multiverse Axis-pubs of our timeline. If nuclear war were ever to break out, you would find the survivors of the United States encamped at Denny’s, hunting giant mutant cockroaches for more protein to put on their Bourbon Bacon Cheeseburgers.
“…Thankfully, Denny’s restaurants are indestructible…”
So are their pancakes.
There’s something to be said for food that will stick to your ribs until archaeologists of the future dig up your remains.
Moons of My Hammy are immune to nukes
So, true story:
Years ago, when I was in college, some friends and I went to a Jethro Tull concert at Stowe Amphitheater, which is tucked in the mountains of Vermont, some distance from the interstate, with only one narrow route back to the nearest interstate exit. When the concert was over, rather than wait in a bumper-to-bumper line crawling along for the 15 miles back to the interstate, I took the back way out, went over Smugglers Notch, and so instead of going straight back to our college, we ended up hungry in Burlington in the early morning of September 11th (this was 1993, long before that date had a special meaning).
Burlington’s not like the metropoles Lottie’s envying; everything was closed except Denny’s. So we stopped there, I got some chicken fingers and fries, ate about half of them, and got the rest packaged up in a styrofoam container to take home. When we got back to the dorm, I tossed the container in the back of my dorm fridge, and forgot about it, until we had to clear stuff out to go home for the winter semester break. I was being rushed to leave, so I just stuck it in a bag with the rest of the things from my fridge and took it home.
When I got home, I stuffed it into the back of my grandmother’s fridge, and forgot about it again. Until, in April, I went home for spring break, and my grandmother asked about the container I’d left in her fridge. So I pulled it out and opened it up, and…
Those fries and chicken fingers looked, and smelled, exactly like they had when I put them in that container seven months earlier.
I haven’t eaten at Denny’s since.
I went today, in honor of this conversation. I had an Avocado Bacon Double Cheeseburger. It was fantastic!
There is a legendary 24-hr vegetarian restaurant in Vancouver, that’s been around since the hippie-heyday in the 70s. They tragically just went to regular hours. No more late night miso fries and gravy. It’s a travesty. I’ve seen a few other classic 24 hour places close down too. This is not right.
Third time’s a charm Glenn. You’re doomed. I mean blessed.
Man, Charlotte is so intoxicatingly magnificent. I wish I had a woman like that in my life. I’d be scared witless. But secretly happy.
I will live vicariously through Glenn. *fingers crossed*
Now that’s what I call eye candy. Or no, eye… vegetables? Eye toxins? Eye something.
Maybe it’s some kind of weird communications device. An eyePhone, if you will.
That figure in the fourth panel seems a bit sinister. I don’t think that’s just a dude with a man-bun, unless the man-bun set has also taken to wearing giant, mutated spikes on their backs and elbows.
Lottie just passed by the present day Blossom and didn’t even notice.
Not content with drawing dragons, Blossom is working on turning into one.
Lottie is not wrong. I lived in the US for three years and grew to quite like the fact I could go to a bookshop at 10pm and buy a cup of tea and a Dragonball manga, or head out for “breakfast” at 3am.
(I can do the latter here in sunny Brighton, but they won’t let me in the bookshops past 5pm.)
Back in the 1980s my young son and I used to spend our Friday evenings browsing Edinburgh’s finest, biggest, independent bookshop until they closed their doors at 10pm. This was before anyone had thought of setting up coffee shops in bookshops, but even if they had, I’d have hung to my meagre few pennies to buy a couple of books. Sadly, bookshops don’t seem to stay open that late any more.
What bookshops were there in town then, it’s before my time but trying to think what might have been there… Armchair Books? Tills’? Southside Books?
Thins Bookshop, Tom, just opposite the Old College and up from Chambers Street. I think it’s Blackwell’s now, and a pale shadow of its former self. We’d check out the latest fiction or local interest promotions near the door, spend hours browsing the science fiction dept, go up to the top floor and browse heavy uni textbooks, wander through the complicated second hand section, check out the shelves of massive, and massively expensive, computer manuals, explore the world in the map section, indulge in the odd pen or notebook in the big stationery dept, and finally head for the basement where OffSpring might persuade me to buy him the latest Asterix book in the children’s section after we’d had a good old rummage in the bargain basement. It was our end–of-the-week pleasure and joy. Oh, and I nearly forgot the music department (I’m a musician) where they had not only masses of CDs but also sheet music. They had everything. I still get waves of grief when I think of what once was, and is no more. (sob!) (Oh, and not an espresso machine in sight!)
I love the subtle touches in these comics. Took me a second look to catch the “Turn Back” sign in panel 1.
There’s a sign with the word “Why” on it just to its left.
Glum wears a tie to the Laundromat. Is he in fact a space alien, or perchance his Mum and Mad Harold’s are sisters?
I think you mean Mad Terry, though now I admit to absolute curiosity about what Mad Harold’s own life might look like!
I know you’ve got your own narrative goals here, but if all I had to read for the next few months were further nocturnes where Charlotte wanders these low-color night time streets, riffing in her maverick way, I would be pretty fucking happy. A whole hard-boiled series, “International Nocturnes”. Delicious.