We didn’t vote for it!
I recognise those two aspirational musical stars. The haircuts are different, but the song remains the same.
Bad Machinery
New comics by John Allison
I recognise those two aspirational musical stars. The haircuts are different, but the song remains the same.
They definitely didn’t vote for Brexit, as they were not old enough to vote at the time.
The haircuts are different but the songs remain the same!
Very Expensive!
….https://m.youtube.com/ watch?v=6zi2FJA6xGk….
Finally!
Now how do I erase all memory of the others?
Very EX-Pensive
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1NY_qWAa81o
To erase memory you go to each visitor to the site, hold down their nose and push a paperclip in to the small hole behind our left ear.
You shouldn’t have told him that. He’s just crazy enough to do it!
That’s the tip of a STRAIGHTENED paper clip, to be sure.
It’s a good thing this is all part of a dream sequence. I hardly ever remember my dreams.
I wonder if John’s regretting the decision to introduce this flashback through Lottie falling asleep.
The hotel may be an antique, but the lobby has no shortage of sidelong glances.
*** please delete mods, ta ***
I note that Beate has her eye on one of the thieves. Perhaps this is another hint that she’s there to solve the crime spree. (If this is correct, my not-entirely-serious suggestion about the Interpol agent was very, very close, but not quite there… Unless Beate’s secretly working with Interpol…)
Interpol probably has extensive personality tests, so maybe not, or she wishes it were true.
Coincidentally, last week I spent the evenings reading Mr. Weinersmith’s Bea Wolf with my young son (after me reading Mr. Heaney’s olde version by myself). Now every time I see Bea it is inevitable that part of my brain wants to name the baddie as Grendel. Mercifully this is tempered by them not visiting the Hotel Heorot (or Treeheart).
Grendel’s a good kid. He just wants new Steeple comics.
he’s a right good laugh once you get to know him
Bea Wulf was so great.
Wait, we know who the thieves are?
It was explained about seven or eight pages back.
I just saw this (days after John posted it), went back looking for the explanation, and found a page I had never seen before. Curse you, RSS bug! I wonder how many other pages I have missed in these stories while wondering why everyone else figured things out before I did.
Outstanding display of Poster’s Bushido. Bravo.
*** please delete mods, ta ***
Euro-Skiing Song? It’s got nice Beate but you can’t dance to it
Oh, I love the adolescent Lottie and Claire here!
This is the get-to-know your fellow guests page. There are the Elite rich and the enthusiastic teen skiers who aren’t in school, the scowling security guy, the bored staff, and the lucky few who’ve found a place to sit. Is that Opa, or Poppa sitting across from the debutante bride? They must have the jewels the boys wish to rescue because it’s cool!
Beautiful page, very powerful. Love how all the characters wearing black seem to be important for the future of the story and very well displayed. Poor Claire, she seems so embarrassed for that disaster called brexit. It’s not her fault.
That hateful and useless Economics education wasn’t entirely wasted!
Though this is before that education.
Personally, I find that the better I understand what’s going on, the worse it gets.
How much of it is greed and belonging to the right club? That hasn’t changed from when the Empire stretched around the world, but all of that became Very Expensive to maintain. I doubt very much if the British people will submit to being a satellite of the United Europe.
Beate’s interlocutor is noticably absent. And given that they have not even checked into their rooms, I suspect we have…. Another clue confirming the imaginary friend theory!
I spotted that too. But I think it’s not so much an imaginary friend as it is a Lottie in her head. My theory is that she’s an obsessed fan who’s developed a parasocial thing and walks around talking to her “best friend.” She’s probably here to solve the same mystery so that the real Lottie will know who she is and instantly think she’s great.
The question is what flipped her obsession from love to hate. Lottie and Claire beating her to the solution? Lottie being rude to her in some fashion? We’ll find out.
Both are possible. At the same time even.
Causing her to wreck on the slopes?
I remember when I was traveling through, Spain, Morocco and Portugal last year, I noticed in airport customs the notably shorter lines for EU passport holders compared to the lines for everyone else. I’m sure Lottie and Claire feel the sting of post-Brexit travel in Europe.
As an architect, the notion of a stone fireplace hood suspended from the ceiling is irksome indeed!
It’s probably plastic faux-stone, which might be even worse? Hopefully the fire is fake too, because an intoxicated would-be skier is certain to fall into that thing at least once a month.
One would hope there are glass panels separating the fire from the intoxicated.
It could be cast refractory material over stainless steel core.
This is the answer that will keep us from having to buy a very expensive hamper.
Criminal Zero! (Though this has been inferred by a previous post, but I just wanted to point out that i noticed him!)
How could you miss him?
It’s easy if you always start counting at one
He’s just casing the joint, looking for an easy mark.
The glamorous lady remnds me – hair colour aside — of Miss Lord. Whatever happened to Miss Lord?
Mrs.
She became Headmistress of Griswalds, per John Campbell’s history (see https://www.gocomics.com/bad-machinery/2024/09/04)
All teachers are Miss or Sir, obviously.
I’m not sure which feels weirder to me, calling Mrs Lord “Miss”, or calling Ryan “Sir”.
But yeah, both “Hard Yards” and “Wen-Tack” established that, after the collapse of Griswalds civilization in “Missing Piece”, Mrs Lord became the new head, with Ryan as deputy head.
Is the seated couple the couple from the storyline that involved a sports team and a one-eyed ghost OSLT?
No
Oh. And I was kind of pleased with myself for remembering it, too. Oh well.
I am strongly averse to the idea of a 15-YEAR callback.
The Kropotkins were already married by the time of “Team Spirit”, and while this is a flashback, it’s a flashback to a time that’s still after the end of Bad Machinery. Lottie was 11 in “Team Spirit”; she’s 19 in the present-day strips, and 16 here.
Also, while the woman has some resemblance to Jana Kropotkin, in that “they came out of the same injection mold” way, her fiancé looks nothing at all like Sergei Kropotkin.
This got me re-reading “Team Spirit”, and then I got sucked into “Good Boy”, as you do, and I just noticed, after 15 years and I don’t know how many read-throughs of it, that Mildred took Pepper’s ball and had it palmed as she approached the magic pencil booth for her winning go.
“Talent is no barrier”
Oh, so you can enter *even if* you have a fairly good chance of winning? 😉
I regretted posting that almost immediately but I don’t know how to delete it. 😐
As far as I know, the only way to delete it is to ask John nicely. Which, if the point is so that John won’t see it, probably isn’t very helpful.
Sellavie. That’s the nature of this comments section. Anonymity and practice. Shame. Shame!
“Sellavie” is both a perfect Groteism and exquisitely painful to read.
Considering the exchange on this page
https://badmachinery.com/comic/mutti-and-vatti/
I think Beate wants to become part of the jewel theif gang.
I (and, judging from comments, several other people) suspect that it’s actually that she wants to capture them.
The center character seems to be the body guard to the rich people and their targeted jewels. A Brock Samson, Race Bannon type minion.
Surprise Go-Kart Conspiracy comeback tour?
Brexit now being in the past for 16-year-old Lottie is kind of hurting my brain. I’m used to her not aging at the same rate I do, but… last time she was 16, it was 2018, and Brexit was still the looming dark cloud on the horizon, but now she was 16 in 2022.
It’s called the Marvel time scale
… I was just doing some backwards math, and realized that this means that, retroactively, the year-plus gap between “Modern Men” and “Space is the Place” was… the pandemic.
Never trust a porter!
They’re invisible despite wearing red uniforms, and too many TV shows have demonstrated they are a devious bunch
No doubt we’ll see that red uniform again in the midst of nefarious goings-on
Or we won’t because he’s too clever to be see again and will hide posing as a guest!
One of the staple Franco-Belgian comics is Spirou, which is about a reporter/adventurer who for some reason wears a porter uniform.
The reason is that the first author of the comic made him a bellhop for a hotel. Then the second author, who moved from single-page gags to more serious adventure albums, changed the hotel into a newspaper and promoted the bellhop to a reporter, following the Tintin formula… but didn’t change how he was clad. That eventually changed much later, after many other author changes.
Porters are also go-to guys who can get you things that nobody else can. Of course there’s a price for everything. The oldest porter is the mastermind who knows so much he’ll never be fired and even after he’s retired there’s a number where he can be reached for help in sticky situations.
Everything about this page is perfect.