No one’s favourite herbal tea
There they are, the cover stars! Have we seen the last of them? I mean, probably, but maybe not.
I moved into a house once that came with a jar of Schwartz “microwave browning”, I’m still slightly unsure what it is. I know what it does, but the product was antiquated back in 2000 and the internet is not helping me.
I vote One-Man Carpet
Giant One-Man Carpet?
That was the super-sized One-Man Carpet annual that DC published
I’m sure that if the trio of creatures featured in panel 4 (and on the cover) actually exist in the Tackleverse, Tom will at some point summon them to Tredregyn to fight Reverend Penrose.
Or the other way round.
What’s on top of the cupboard? It looks like a micro-Charlotte observing the proceedings.
It’s Lottie’s alter ego/inner thoughts/conscience/who-knows-what-else, first seen in the previous story: https://badmachinery.com/comic/for-the-love-of-michael/.
She’s been lurking around since.
Thx, didn’t make the connection
But nice spotting her
Mmm. But she may just have made a crucial error. From my experience, the surfaces on top of a high wall-minded kitchen cupboard are not somewhere even an abstract mental construct wants to lurk.
I found some Microwave Browning in the back of the cupboard, the instructions say:
“Look, now, I melt a gourd-fruit into mash,
Add honeycomb and pods, I have perceived,
Which bite like finches when they bill and kiss,—
Then, when froth rises bladdery, drink up all,
Quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain”
I’m thinking 3 minutes at full power then?
Sounds like that microwave browning is the eldritch flavour.
Someone random enough to assemble such a pantry, yet meticulous enough to identify each of those items as theirs is, indeed, Someone of Interest.
Today I have learned about cobnuts. This comic is quite educational.
Oh Gawd, I sure hope it isn’t that wanker Dean Thompson (Giant Days flashback).
If it is then maybe we’ll also see a return of Daisy (my personal fav)
perhaps it’s Dick Tracy.
“Wanker”! Now there’s an epithet one doesn’t hear too often these days.
It still enjoys currency here in Australia, where a colourful insult will always find welcome.
Unless you watch Ted Lasso.
Looks like someone hasn’t been following the leadership debates
Labeling a bunch of inedible food feels like a very Dean Thompson thing to do. I am officially scared.
Pretty sure DT is Double Trouble, from Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego. Unless it’s not.
Oh gosh. I just realized that show is 30+ years old.
How about Legends Of The Hidden Temple?
I am given to understand from reading Dr. McNinja that one of the kids who got caught by the Temple Guards literally screamed and ran off the set.
Television was better then, wasn’t it?
I remember microwave browning from when my parents bought their first one, a hulking great Panasonic beast. You’d brush it on meat to get the roasted-crispness look that microwaving just can’t impart.
We never went near the stuff. It had the air of paint-on carcinogen.
Schwartz Browning is a brand of food coloring used primarily to make things like gravy have a brown color. You can also find it in soft drinks like cola and root beer, and some cheaper alcohol like brandy, rum, and whisky. It is made by lightly scorching a carbohydrate like sugar or molasses. By itself it has a slightly bitter but sweet flavor, but it is usually overpowered by the flavor of the food to be colored.
Why “Microwaveable” is a bit of a puzzler. Perhaps it needs to be heated in order to pour. Like some molasses or treacle.
The stuff you’re describing might work in a conventional oven, but it would take up steam emerging from microwaved food and turn soggy, unless it were ingeniously modified by Modern Chemistry — cf. the remark above about brush-on cancer.
Schwartz Browning! In the USA we put Caramel coloring in our Coke
Death’s Head’s automated one-man band
We hope you will enjoy the show
Death’s Head’s automated one-man band
Sit back and let the evening go
Yes?
Take the A-Train!
Is that microwaveable browning made by… Amstrad…?
Ok I’m calling it; it’s all three and Giant Ground Sloth, Living Carpet and Automated One Man Band are the Bobbinsverse equivalent of Marvel’s Sinister Six.
The Deleterious Three
The Rowdy Three?
No, in the Bobbinsverse, Tampa Bay’s soccer team is called the Crazy Men, not the Rowdies
Someone really needs to name a pro sports team the Crazy Men.
Is there a Tampa bay in the Bobbinsverse. I get the sense that the USA is more of an abstract concept there, like it is for most of us Brits…
Lottie’s chibi Vampirella is watching. Does this mean that Lottie is exaggerating with reasoning and suspicion about something that is probably all in her mind? The fact that DT has particular food tastes is interesting, them are probably an extravagant person, but calling them a problem child seems too much to me.
It’s not Mad Terry after an upgrade to Deranged Terry is it?
Or maybe it’s Mrs Terry! Did we ever learn her first name? Could her full name be Dolores Terry?
I can see why microwave browning never caught on, who wants a brown microwave?
Rose hip and Turmeric tea, for the self-hating tea fancier.
I’ve sort of lost track of what we’re doing here. Whose kitchen are they in here? Are they at home? Is this a shared kitchen in their building or… are they somewhere else?
The Guardianship thingy they signed up to has shared facilities with other residents.
Ref: https://badmachinery.com/comic/do-whatever-you-like-with-them/
Comments like this make me lose faith in my ability to tell a story at all.
Go back and look up what Isaac Asimov said about literacy.
This? “…the age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.”
Or something else?
I thought it would be this: “True literacy is becoming an arcane art and the United States is steadily dumbing down.”
It could be many of us are not familiar what is a “Guardianship”, or what exactly this housing arrangement is. My thoughts on what is going on keep evolving as I piece bits of info together.
“My thoughts on what is going on keep evolving as I piece bits of info together.” Isn’t that how reading anything’s supposed to work, though? I mean, how else would it work?
Hot fresh sonnets from the Portuguese in mere minutes.
Me, living in Kent: Why would you buy cobnuts? They literally grow on trees!
I’m reasonably sure DT means Don’t Tamper, and by my hazy knowledge of cinema history I don’t think either of our protagonists want to know what is Behind the Green Door!
Or just “don’t touch”.
Inevitable appearance of “Desmond Tishman”
Des is just hazy on the difference between an ‘F’ and a ‘T’, and gets sulky and melodramatic whenever anyone tries to correct him.
i found the patent application for Microwave Browning, does that help?
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO1999057999A1/en
(never heard of such a monstrous thing myself until just now)
Missing Item! As noted in the previous strip by commenter ‘M’, DT also added his/her moniker to a Miso package in the fridge and I don’t see it here. Maybe Lottie saw it and discarded it as irrelevant to the building of the profile.
As a feckless youth on a botany field trip in deepest Suffolk, one of the teaching assistants let it slip that a trick they are taught is to stride ahead of the class and look out for any plant that they can’t identify so that that they can be standing on it when us proles reach them. I consider this an essential skill in the Lottie arsenal.
Miso is a fridge item. These are cupboard items. Hand in your badge and gun, detective.
Don’t Touch