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Lottie wore that x-Files hat in the final Bad Machinery story. I reckon it’s a Zazzle or Redbubble, not official merch. Don’t tell Skinner!
Bad Machinery
New comics by John Allison
Lottie wore that x-Files hat in the final Bad Machinery story. I reckon it’s a Zazzle or Redbubble, not official merch. Don’t tell Skinner!
You wouldn’t want to run afoul of Skinner’s Fist.
Not such a happy ending for Miyamoto-sensei.
No, you don’t want to run afoul of Skinner’s Fist:
https://www.shaenon.com/monsteroftheweek/2022/10/23/mow-32/
I am assuming Linton used ‘Potty’ in the insane sense and not in the toilet sense
Linton doesn’t seem to be the calm, logical force this team probably needs to solve the doppelganger’s identity
Will he shine later just when it all seems lost?
He better, unless John decides to go against the traditional cliches of adventure storytelling…
Calm/ Maybe not. But Linton’s emotional outburst is caused by Lottie’s lack of logic in her past actions. So, it goes along with being logical. Logic and emotion aren’t actually opposites, regardless of what those Vulcans might tell you.
Linton’s outburst means that he cares about Lottie even when she does something stupid.
Exactly. He loves Lottie and was TRYING not to yell at her for being dumb. She asked him to let it out and he did. And given her defense was “I was young and I solved a case so it’s okay”, dosen’t exactly help. His comment about Sensei is insenstive.. but his expressoin is less razzing her for it and more sheer disbelief at the number of bad outcomes caused by this one event, with Shauna stopping him from continuing as Lottie feels bad enough.
Nice to see Shauna so protective towards Lottie. But the way she looks at Linton when he snaps… I think she agrees with him. Love the Feed the squirrel sequence too.
After all, that squirrel could be related to MiniChibiLottie.
As long as it isn’t one of Angela Melick’s psychotic squirrels from wastedtalent.ca…
A squirrel so friendly with Lottie can only be one of Squirrel Girl’s friend.
Lottie and Squirrel Girl needs to be a crossover.
Oh man, I miss Wasted Talent.
TASTED WALENTS
I am fascinated by Shauna’s wide eyes in panel 2. You can tell she is holding something in.
Also, will we ever see the story of Lottie’s trip to Sin City?
Shauna’s eyes in panel 3 are also interesting. You can see she agrees with Linton in thinking Lottie did another one of her classic weirdness.
Shauna’s expressions in Panel 1 are great!
Lottie calling Linton “Hun” gives me life. Him yelling at her less so but his frustration is understandable.
I also love that Lottie’s excusepathy towards Glenn, healing old friendships, and doing a lot of good.. but she’s still the was “I was young and stupid”.. when just a week ago, two at most, she blew up her whole life and buisness to manage her himbo boyfriends kpop band, then thought the best solution to that was to do a yoko ono style protest. Lottie’s loveable, kind not a bad person, but like her goth mentor you would not be suprised if they woke up in a bathub misisng kidney from a rush decision.
…This might come from my being an American and not aware of certain UK slang, but Linton calling Lottie “Potty Grote” years ago had led me to second guess if Grote was pronounced “Grot-ee” instead of Grote as in “boat”, to you know, make a juvenile rhyme. Unless “potty” is as Alan speculated that Linton meant it as just being crazy bonkers? Someone please free me from this decade-long confusion.
I believe the juvenile rhyme is with “Lottie”, not with “Grote”. And, yeah, it’s the adjective definition.
I’m pretty sure it was one of Lottie’s less flattering nicknames when they were all kids.
It’s exactly that. I mostly remembered that re-reading volume 1 of Bad Machinery (really gotta get on the rest I just forgot how emotionally devistating the series can be and i’m reluctant to get to chapter 3).
It also reminded me Linton… could be a bit of a jerk. I assume he gets better as the chapters go on but he did have a habit of needling jack and Sonny. But it felt realistic, as he’s the most traditionally masculine of the three and hadn’t gorwn enough to understand being senstive isn’t a cause for teasing. The childishly calling the girl who annoys him potty fit. Yet he feels evolved form previous mild jerk milford from Scary Go Round, as while he’ll needle jack, he’s there when his mate needs him and vice versa. Same with Sonny. Linton could be blunt and sarcastic, and ocasionally miopic in his goals, but he genuinely cares about the other mystery kids.
It’s a sign of both growth and love he showed up. He didn’t get a whole story to clean up the rift that had grown between him and Lottie the way Mildred and Shauna did. Yet all it took was one text from shauna (and a not so unfair reimbursment for his train ticket), to get him to go to Scotland to help and a quick talk to get past the wounds left from the mystery kids breaking up. My baby boy is all grown up and it’s heartwarming to see. Same with all the kids so far..except jack but that’s less because he’s grown up and more because he’s stuck in a high concept waking nightmare with no clear way out.
Let’s just say tact is not one of Linton’s strengths.
“Linton’s not the most tactful person I know. He’s the least tactful person I know.” -Sonny Craven
Thank you!
I have always pronounced it GROAT-ee like Jerry Grote, the catcher for the 1969 World Series champion Mets.
It’s Grote like Stoat
Ah, I’m finally free! Thank you, John!
Grote, as in “Grotesque”.
Not Grotty, as in “Grotesque, but when George Harrison says it”.
Lottie is Grote; the Lottiegänger is merely Grote-esque.
This storyline incidentally made me find out that the classic German children’s book”The Double Lotty” is what is known in the anglosphere as “The Parent Trap”.
Kelvingrove Park is looking good!
Well, my estimation of Lottie as a Solver just took a leap from “fanciful” to “legit”. Apologies all, for my lack of faith.
And that means that we might not find a clue about this doppleganger in the archives after all. Alas.
But now that this jewel heist story has been dropped, and is the link between her face and Miyamoto, then I think we might have found a clue to the origin of our villainess.
Of all the Tackleford Mystery Kids, Lottie was the one most likely to go pro as an investigator – nominated for Teen Detective of the Year, even if she never broke the 18 under 18 list. While they all had skills, only Lottie and Linton made mysteries their identity, and Linton always felt doomed to go establishment.
I am somewhat thrown by her claim to have met Miyamoto-Sensei in Vegas, when Wicked Things shows her first encountering him in London, and then he got stabbed. Is this a result of Jack messing with history? A partial decanonising of Wicked Things? Did I misread WT and it was set in the Cockney Quarter of Vegas?
No, I misread it
Also, readers, if I make a continuity mistake, PLEASE PLEASE just email me and tell me so I can fix it, don’t bury it 40 comments deep in a series of sardonic conjectures. I am “time poor”.
All continuity errors in Scary Go Round brand comics can be explained by infinite instances of Cilla Black and her evil Nemulon clones time-traveling from dark and corrupt futures to Destroy History.
Lottie says she “saw” Miyamoto-Sensei in Vegas, but not that she actually met him there, so, could be.
Or did JA change her words before I posted this?
I just googled the premise of this plot point, and as suspected, this is not a thing. I feel silly for even having doubted. As punishment, I will have to endure a week or so of plastic surgery ads.
Not a thing.
Yet.
(A bleedin’ I is EVERYWHERE!)
I have to say once more how much I love John’s art. If I could clone him so that he could do the art for all his work without becoming a shell of a husk of a shadow of a man I would do so and then pay both Johns handsomely to do so.
A man can dream…
On the other hand, as a writer John has been able to work with some terrific artists. I, for one, am awfully glad he got Max Sarin to draw an issue of Steeple. John writing and John drawing is best, but the rest is very very good too.
I wouldn’t worry about that in the future, due to the rude health of the industry I’m fairly sure I have been paid to write a direct market comic book for the last time (no cuss to my various editors, who have been very kind to me).
It is a sad world that will not pay you to produce comics for it.
This is one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard in comics, and makes me feel it’s ever more important for us, your readers, to continue to support you financially.
When Amazon closed Comixology down, they removed the method by which my readers were most comfortable supporting my non-webcomic efforts. I can’t get people to subscribe to my series at comic shops. It’s not down to a lack of willing, but many aren’t comic shop people and don’t realise that if in 2025 if you don’t pre-order, there won’t be a copy on the shelf of most things. Moaning about this seems churlish. I am lucky to have readers drawn from a broad demographic. But I can’t issue a simple call to action that works for my print titles any more, that encompasses every country and every option, which is why I doubt I’ll be getting another go round. There are barely any outlets left to review my work any more. It’s getting harder every year.
It is NOT churlish. I too think the way Amazon took Comixology behind the woodshed and shot it was abominable – I had a budding library there I can hardly stand to read anymore, Amazon’s own interface is so bad. Bezos clearly doesn’t much care.
I am not a rich man, but I feel bad that my own efforts to support you financially over the years have been so paltry nonetheless. Again, monthly charges can be hard for me due to the nature of my contract work, but I would be thrilled to support you in a Kickstarter or any other similar method to make sure you are safe, secure, healthy, and can keep making the cartoons we all love, which have kept me from depression’s ragged door so many times.
In my tinfoil-hat-wearing mode, I suspect that the trashcanning of the popular art markets is an attempt of Them to wrench any method of inspiring, refining and teaching the peasants out of their hands and return it to those of the privileged few.
They are already replacing the paying of artists with AI copyright ripoff pablum.
And that is not tinfoil conjecture.
The truth is far more banal and depressing than that. They don’t care about any of that. They just want to own out entire culture so they can sell it back to us one licensing fee at a time.