Smiffys
Smiffys is a real shop. The first time you see one, it seems to be a temporary outlet, the sort of thing so flimsy that it could not possibly trade all year round. It’s got “that logo” with the sort of smile-tick thing. But this is not the case. You can get a sexy dray horse costume in one of five UK retail locations and at many, many stockists.
Here’s an unsexy dray horse to calm things down. I think, strictly speaking, the dray is the cart with the barrels on it.
That IS a very sexy dray horse, but easily identified
I worry something will happen to Glinda’s frocks and they’ll lose the dowager’s trust
*not easily identified
I wouldn’t be apposed to Lottie in that costume.
Halloween? Wait, when is Glenn’s birthday? 20 October? The day before mine?
October 20 is already the birthday of Our Lord And Saviour, Desmond Fishman. (Coincidentally, it’s also the birthday of some webcomic creator named John Allison. That probably has nothing to do with anything, though.)
If Lottie had been around during Bitsy’s prime, the Profumo Affair would’ve gone VERY differently.
That Lottie in the horse outfit looks ready to kick out any potential nuisance. I’m glad that the dear Bitsy wants to lend them her sister’s dresses, they’ll be the most glamorous girls at the party. Let’s hope Glenn can survive so much beauty.
The dray horse is going to give the dowager’s nephew ideas. Forest wrestling clubs may be verboten, but no one said anything about farm wrestling clubs.
I don’t think that the story *started* with a Wobbly Head, but I do believe that it will *end* with one!
“Smiffys is a real shop. The first time you see one, it seems to be a temporary outlet, the sort of thing so flimsy that it could not possibly trade all year round. It’s got “that logo” with the sort of smile-tick thing. But this is not the case. You can get a sexy dray horse costume in one of five UK retail locations and at many, many stockists.”
Across the pond, we have the Spirit of Halloween outlets that pop up in September to haunt abandoned retail locations nationwide. They disappear as abruptly as the Ghost of Christmas Past on November 1st. It’s uncanny. One might even say … supernatural.
Sounds like something out of a Ray Bradbury story…
Multiversal merchants from the horny and the spooky realities. Don’t stay in their store past midnight, and best don’t even look at the costume once the bleak November sun rises
If you wish to lean the lore of this establishment one can find the secrets here: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/600-spirit-halloween/
Sounds like Smiffy’s is almost like a UK equivalent of Spirit Halloween stores here in the States. Right now I’m wondering if Smiffy’s has horny Malaysian tapir costumes available.
Last time I was in a Smiffy’s it was basically a party goods and children’s Hallowe’en costume store in the front, prettty much a sex shop in the back. It was okay though, because there was a curtain of tangled streamers to defend the innocence of young trick or treaters.
“What’ll it be then, squire? Stag do, is it?”
It’s been so long since I’ve been in a Smiffy’s I completely forgot the seedy sex shop aspect.
Thanks for cooling my remeniscences of cheap plasticy halloween tat.
I should have anticipated that John would be spoiling us with Lottie and Claire fashion this arch.
Perhaps we will get a montage of them trying on outfits.
Wait a minute…in that flashback, that looks either like an Australian or a New Zealand flag…Could it be…The Dowager is Glenn’s former wife???…And Glenn is a time traveler?!!
Is she picturing her past? Or her idea of what a birthday party for Glenn would look like?
It could be. Then again does she know that Glenn is a Kiwi?
On the previous page, she specifically called him a Kiwi, when she brought him up.
Presumably all he had to do was hear him pronounce literally any word with a soft “e” sound in it
“all SHE had to do”
dang it, this keyboard is LITERALLY missing its ‘s’ keycap
You’re going to have to start talking like Claire.
I think it is her past; not least because she is specifically saying that in the panel. I also think this scene does not take place in New Zealand but at a consulate or embassy or whatever they had in London at the time.
The Australian flag has white stars, so that would have to be a New Zealand flag. If a sheep or flightless parrot was visible anywhere in that panel, it would be definitive proof.
A sheep? A flightless parrot?
A tuatara would be the clincher.
Or, for Dark New Zealandry, a sheep-eating parrot or a giant scavenging cricket-y thing
The Lady Swaledale is actually Glyurn’s grandmother (on his mother’s side) and she’s trying to help him along discreetly…
“Unknown to Speed, Racer X is really his older brother Rex, who ran away from home years ago.”
“ahh… Ahhhh! AHHHHHH!”
Maybe I am having screen resolution/eyesight issues but in what pose is the pooch (Peekums or Willie) nearest the top left? I know John likely deliberately drew them as white clouds with miniscule darker features but that one is just a blob. Which end is which? …or maybe I am confused and one of the dowager’s boas simply fell off the shelf?
I think it is lying on its side.
The “dogs” are actually featureless masses of pure fluff, with no limbs, eyes, or orifices of any kind. They eat by absorbing food directly through physical contact.
Sounds like a tribble.
Trying to be helpful: In Claire’s last line, “outrgeous” needs an “a”.
Fixed!
I’m sure the horse in the photograph is very sexy to other dray horses.
Bodray horseitivity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w18NGVqm0bg
Thanks for that; that was really nice.
Ah! Wadworths, takes me back to my student days. Wadworths 6X is the one to try. And still going.
I dunno, I feel like if you’re a horse, that dray horse is probably a muscled bodybuilder. Very sexy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w18NGVqm0bg
In panel 4, the dowager’s “I think I…” the first I is sans-serif. This broke my brain. I went through past comics to see stand-alone “I”s are always serif but all others are sans. I never once noticed until today but it greatly improves readability.
I know nothing about comic lettering. Maybe this is typical and I’m just unobservant.
Yes, in comics the first person “I” is always written with crossbars. It aids readability I think?
https://balloontales.com/why-the-crossbar-i-rule/#:~:text=As%20far%20as%20we%20understand,in%20the%20middle%20of%20words.
Fascinating. I never noticed
Except in panel 4.
Yes as is so often the case here, the pointing out of a typo was hidden in a comprehension exercise for the person who has to correct it.
Sorry!
Haha no need to apologise!!
THANK YOU for that link! I’ve seen some comics folks pointing in shame to their early faux pas of putting crossbars on I in the middle of words, but I had never been able to find an explanation for why it’s considered a lettering blunder – the internet search engines only brought me more examples of said pointing in shame.
I was happy to hear Glenn’s birthday celebration will be at a halloween party.. and that their benevolent new benefactor is providing them finery. Something I realized from this is that John has a history of great party events for his cast: You have Ryan getting punched out at a high school party in scary go round, the disaster at the winter’s ball in Giant Days, the house party where Esther learned her ex was macking on her best friend and both were pissed at here, the end of school dance that lead to Dean Thompson fleeing the country in a pre prepared car, and my personal faviorite and something i’m glad to see John taking another stab at, Shelly’s halloween rager. Sexy ghosts, pumpkin heads, and awkward breakups, it’s one of his finest stories, ending with the begining of a friendship that defined scary go round and probablys till results in ryan popping in for a sandwich every so often.
On the bright side given this party is nowhere near a house and Lottie’s ex is far away being explotied for profit by a mysterious ghoul of a music manager, the only sexy ghost of years past to haunt her is whoever set her up for crimes and derailed her whole life! What Fun!
Not to forget M A G G I E ‘ S P A R T Y .
I did type three spaces there between the words. Ah well.
HTML eats whitespace. I think this comment system will let you get an actual three-space gap by typing in place of the middle one.
M A G G I E ‘ S P A R T Y
You can sometimes use other empty HTML tags in between to do it as well, I think?
HAH my efforts were foiled by wordwrap
Curse you sentence length!
(Okay, this one swallows empty HTML tags)
Unrelated to this page but news I felt like getting out, i’m working on completing my physical collection of giant days and bad machinery. I got a few of each a few years back, all at various half priced books, but I held off completing my quest as I figured “eh giant days is on comixology unlimited I can visit it any time”. I hadn’t and the earlier volumes of for better or worse being removed from amazon for no real reason made me realize that while Giant Days PROBABLY isn’t going anywhere, it’s safter to grab it now while it’s not 20 dollars a volume. Ditto with bad machinery.
So I got volumes 1-4 of giant days and volume 4 of bad machinery and plan to get the rest as I can afford it. I also thumbed though some of giant days and it holds up well, I forgot just HOW many great lines are packed into it and it’s hard to crack open a volume and not read at least one issue as it was a master at one in done stories that still connected to a larger narrative. It also makes me hope we’ll see the main three again someday. Maybe not together, john’s told 14 volumes worth of stories of that, but i’d love to see where they are now. Especially esther as she has a LOT of unresolved buisness she coudln’t do while in giant days limbo. I mean you’d think something that happened in high school decades ago wouldn’t bother her but given Erin and Eustace had to have a whole arc in some weird pocket dimension dealing with her presence in their lives, they may need a chat. Also Dean probably still resents her because that’s just kinda the guy he is and i’td be fun to see how lottie deals with that nonsense.
I love those characters but I got it just right back then, more stories would spoil it. I considered a sequel series and it made me very depressed. It had the foul whiff of the Gilmore Girls revival.
Hey, the only real problem with the Gilmore Girls revival was that it wasn’t set immediately after the series, when it would have made sense, rather than years later, when it made no sense at all from a character standpoint (ISTR it was actually Amy Sherman-Palladino’s original planned ending for the series had she not been bounced from her own show by the network before its final season)
And that it was horrible in every possible way
There’s a shop here in Manchester called ‘Luvyababez’ that sells all that kind of sexy non-sexy nonsense. Just typing the name out made me dry heave.
https://www.luvyababes.co.uk/
Actually I couldn’t find anything appalling enough to mention on their website; it’s all very tame
I did enjoy the naming of this copyright-free costume however: https://www.luvyababes.co.uk/1990s-ginger-power-icon-adult-costume.ir
…which is a Smiffy’s product (note that its product code on the Luvyababes site starts with SMI)
https://www.smiffys.com/products/ginger-power-1990s-icon-costume
Clearly you get together with four others to make up up your “Iconic Seasoning Ladies” group