Poor kid
Lottie doesn’t often flex her German these days, but as you can see, it was just as good as her French.
Bad Machinery
New comics by John Allison
Lottie doesn’t often flex her German these days, but as you can see, it was just as good as her French.
Beate is starstruck.
Will she speak with Lottie & Claire or is the distance between them too great?
Ou est la plume der Aufzug?
Google translate was clearly not an option back then!
And clearly we can dismiss Beate knowing of Lottie prior to this, so on with the next round of plot theories…
No, she definitely knew of Lottie before this, since she recognizes her and Claire in the final panel. She wasn’t expecting her to be there, and doesn’t seem to feel any particular close connection to Lottie, but she definitely already knew of her.
It feels so appropriate that Lottie’s greatest foe is someone who wasn’t even an afterthought to her.
Ah ha! She is a rival mystery kid. But how does she fit, this misfit?
She’s ALREADY figured out that Lottie & Claire are on the same case, while they’re not even aware of her…!
AHA! Beate is a would-be Teen Detective!
As several of us were already theorizing she was, as of last page.
Yeah, an unclosed tag messed up my sentence in that I had meant for only “is” to be emphasized, which would have made it clear I was referring to earlier speculation being borne out.
A would be teen-detective sadly corrupted and sent down a path of crime.
It’s the Waluigi effect!
All will work out as long as Lottie remembers how to say “Ich beschuldige!”
In German it would rather be “Ich klage an!”
Thank you. I was relying on the google translation.
So, it doesn’t look as if Beate’s imaginary (?) friend is actually based on Lottie. Beate’s reaction to Lottie and Claire in that final panel indicates she knows who they are, but it’s not the reaction I’d expect if she saw herself specifically as Lottie’s protege in some way. Also, the Imaginary Friend’s hair resembled modern Lottie’s more than Lottie at the time’s. And we never saw her face.
NOW I’M A BELIEVER
Wouldn’t that be if we HAD seen her face?
I don’t blame lottie for avalanche jitters. I’m pretty sure the movie Force Mujer came out a few years before this time.
All Europeans live in constant fear of avalanches, much as all Australians are always moments away from being bitten by a crocodile or poisonous spider.
Or a poisonous crocodile.
Or a venomous crocodile!
Or a venomous poisson!! You’d think you would be safe if you avoid bodies of water, but Australian fish came up with attacks from the sky, hundreds of miles inland, long before the first drop bears.
Who do you think is DROPPING the drop bears?
It’s the spider crocodiles that really worry me.
We didn’t come here to fornicate arachnids, mate
Now I’m picturing French vacationers at the beach in Nice, nervously glancing northeastwards and never letting go of their balises d’avalanche.
Exactly! (One should always dress properly for an avalanche!)
Oh! She really is there to solve the case! And the fact that she recognizes them means she won’t mix Lottie up with her imaginary friend. More likely, the imaginary friend is based on Lottie.
And she’s already as good as invisible to Charlotte. The unintended slight! The consuming jealousy! It all began right there in that elevator!
I like your idea. I just think that it won’t take a single slight that will do it. After all, if one slight would do it, this’d be a much shorter comic. Having a series of comic slights, however…
The first slight can be written off as “Wellll, she just came in, she’s probably tired…”. But then, it’s going to be slight after slight, and the rationalization is going to run thin. Until it runs out.
The sad thing is, Beate will probably be justified in feeling slighted, as La Grote is just going to swan her way through the detection and show just how clever she can be.
I’d love it if it was the song contest that cause all this to happen. Beate has an amazing routine worked out.
Yep! I also meant the unintentional slighting began in this elevator. I bet Beate follows them around the whole time and they never notice her.
Is it very crass of me to be somewhat reminded of Iron Man 2?
I’ve always been kinda saddened by stories where the poor, lonely guy becomes the psychopathic killer. But I’m curious to see how it happened and why Lottie has no memory of it.
I worried about this the whole time I was making this story, but make your judgement on what sort of person Beate is when it has finished.
Sure! I love to be surprised and read a story that go in ways i ways totally unable to immagine. Is just the beginning and there are still 19 pages for surprise everyone multiples times.
What I will say, with no spoilers, is that Beate has many skills and a lot of spirit!
My guess is Beate has already solved this mystery of the jewel robbery.
Lottie swans in and takes credit. A professional jealousy is created.
So young and already alcoholic? Poor Beate!
She may not be drinking it, she may be using it to clean items
I don’t know how your atr is immediately recognisable as a ski resort full of school children, so impressive!
Beate must know something about those boys. Maybe even more than Lottie & Claire? But if they were to share their information and each take some of the credit, would that be better? (Or is that expecting too much?)
There’s a language barrier, given Lottie’s “100% fluency.”
More Germans learn English than English learn German. This probably has a lot to do with Americans, Hollywood and Cowboys!
Teensy point about panel 2. “Fräulein” has essentially been a dead word in German since the 90s or thereabout. It sometimes gets used ironically, but even that’s fading. Any woman old enough to be addressed with an honorific is addressed as “Frau.”
I also wanted to point out that Germany has a pretty strong mystery kids tradition. It’s imported–The Three Investigators from the US and The Five Friends from the UK–but both are popular, particularly as audio plays. The Investigators (Die Drei ???) are the bigger franchise by far; in fact, there’s so much that they must have long ago gone well past the original source material. The stuff Beate would have heard and/or read would likely have been homegrown.
I apologise for any anachronisms, as a 1990s artist working in the 1990s style (so I am told) we must treat the appearance of “Fräulein” in the same way as the appearance of such phrases in my work as “a hearty handclasp” which I got from a film from 1940. I can only disappoint you.
Lean into it! Now that you’ve got a “Fraulein” in there, toss in a “Supertittenaffenguil” to round it out! Also dead since the 90’s, I’m told, but much more fun to say (and try to translate)!
The translator site I just asked said “super monkey guil”, which doesn’t advance things much.
“Super monkey tits horny” or “Super monkey tits awesome.”
Thanks.
W. C. Fields movie, I think? I remember the feeblest handshake ever–I’m not sure they even touch.
The Bank Dick! Yes! One of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on screen.
“It’s a Gift” is great, as well…
“No, I don’t know any Carl LaFong, capital ‘L’, small ‘a’, capital ‘F’, small ‘o’, small ‘n’, small ‘g’, and if I DID know any Carl LaFong, I wouldn’t admit it!”
Nothing to apologize for. It didn’t even jump out at me until my third reading or so. It’s a small cultural thing that isn’t obvious to anyone who hasn’t lived in country. And I’ve always enjoyed your occasional drop into 40s era idiom.
If that word is no longer used perhaps it could be re-purposed?
“Fräulein” sounds like you’re bossing a restaurant worker or bartender.
But fictional German is its own dialect.
Like when a fictional Scot says “Hoots, man!”
* hoots mon!
;p
It’s also not a stretch to see that as in character for Beate.
To be honest I always took Bad Lottie as being insane. But Beate doesn’t seem insane. At least not yet.
Beate isn’t Bad Lottie (yet). Also, we don’t actually know how sane or otherwise she is (yet). There are plenty of people who seem quite sane much of the time, but really aren’t.
Well, she has an imaginary friend, a definite fascination with Lottie, and a bit of a reputation as a sad loner. None of those are evidence of craziness, but they might be signs of someone who’s heading in the wrong direction.
/me looks at checklist
Apparently I’m one imaginary friend away from becoming a serial killer.
One imaginary fiend
IS she fascinated with Lottie, though? She recognizes Lottie and Claire, and apparently knows why they’re there, but she thinks “I recognize those two”, not “Oh my God it’s HER!!!!”
Ok, my latest theory is…
The unhinged heiress (shown in the previous page “We didn’t vote for it”) who is about to be married does not have her diamonds stolen. This sounds positive until you realise she was broke and in cahoots with the thieves for the insurance money. Things spiral after her fiance dumps her and she devotes her life to ‘getting even’ with Lottie – because all spoilt, rich kids need an obsession!
The heiress is too long-legged.
I dunno, I smell herring. My money is still on Sonny. What’s the odds that the new character introduced during a flashback, and whose possibly imaginary friend bares a superficial resemblance to evil Lottie happens to be the the bad gal.
You forgot “and whose name is spelled out by the Scrabble letters left at the scene of we-don’t-know-what-happened-yet.”
(Rob’s hands literally flew to his mouth in an oh-my-god moment as he paged backward to last issue’s conclusion)
Germans only use paternosters. I thought everyone knew that.
They also use hoists with horses or oxen
Even at swank hotels where the guests have an awful lot of luggage?
I rode one in Frankfurt almost every day.
But not in a swank hotel, mind you.
Goethe Uni-Frankfurt
It’s a good thing it’s not a paternoster, or Claire would probably end up trapped on it for the rest of the story.
I just finished the novel Changing Places by David Lodge, which featured a paternoster in a key scene near the end, and was grateful to John for introducing me to this machine a couple of years ago!
Add avalanches to Lottie’s many weaknesses, seagulls being high on that list