We’re Mapplethorpes!
Stanage Plantation car park is a real thing that you can find on a map. In fact, with a little work, you can plot the journey from the edge of Ranmoor to Stanage on Google Streetview and add minutes to your enjoyment of this comic. Or ruin it entirely.
Ooh, I’m the first. I have nothing to say except that myself, my mother, and her other daughter have also been lost on Stanage in the mist. A very patient farmer took us in.
did he let you out, or are you stuck there working the chicken sheds still>
Lottie can use the puffer as an emergency shelter, if need be. She seems quite glad she pulled it out.
Or maybe she is tickled by the phrase “wet lettuces”.
I was pretty sure it was the latter
Is this a Chekhov’s Puffer situation?
I note that they are not following a trail. Is Stanage generally trailless open space?
There are trails. Your choice of trails. Some of which may go where you think you want to go. Some of which don’t really go anywhere.
And a lot of open space.
I think Lottie is pleased to see the Mapplethorpes working together.
I suspect Lottie’s glee is because thereal solving has begun.
Any moment now the giant phosphorescent hound will come lurching out of the mist
I really like how you do mist here, it looks really cool
Came here to say the same. It reminds me of when I was growing up in Oregon. There was a golf course near the end of my paper route which became mystical on certain mornings. I don’t have many fond memories of those days, but that’s one of them. Thanks John!
Something about these mist effects bring me back to the early Scary-Go-Round years.
I could imagine, with a longer storyline, the mist effects (specifically the loss of outlines) as being the beginning of an SGR-style supernatural event. Careful out there, Lottie and Mapplethorpes! You’ve already lost your outer protection against the mist walruses! (I don’t know why walruses – it sounded just left-field enough. Maybe they’re in league with the portuguese man-o-wars.)
I thought so too! I think it’s partly the lack of outlines. It’s really cool.
Mist it by THAT much!
I was trying to make out what the bumper sticker on the back window of the parked car says, but, alas, these old eyes can no longer focus that well.
I can’t make it out either, but I thought it was just the mist obscuring what it says.
N.b.: I’ve gotten to the point where I occasionally need reading glasses, but I haven’t quite yet admitted that the ol’ eyesight ain’t what it used to be.
Sadly, the pdf is not much help. It appears to be two words and what looks like a mug at the end. Pretty sure the second word is Ford.
Perfume Ford? Perkins Ford? Derfins Ford?
It looks a bit like a Ford Fiesta, though I wouldn’t expect a dealership name to be on the window. Maybe it’s a location or a pub?
I’ve had a look on the original and I’m sorry to say that it says “Berfuss Ford”, which was not interpretable by any normal mind.
Ah yes, Berfuss Ford, REM’s legendary manager
That’s okay.
I don’t come to this comic for “normal”.
I managed to make out Ford too, and recognised it was a MK1 Fiesta. Out of curiosity I put the registration into one of those apps where you can check MOT history etc and it came up as a Ford… Focus!
Dealership window stickers are, or were, a pretty common thing. At least round here. I’ve seen a lot – but less in recent years. My brothers got an Escort of similar vintage to the Fiesta in the comic with an “Evan Halshaw” Ford dealer sticker.
(I’m a bit of a car nerd, so I quite like the appearances of recognisable real cars in John’s comics – especially the classics!)
Where is “round here”?
Bottom of Britain.
“Steeple” country.
(Cornwall)
Prefect Ford. I hope that exists somewhere…
Hopefully enjoying a Dentrassi-made drink.
“And now we find ourselves in a fathomless and featureless void” is pretty much how I’ve greeted every day since late 2016.
“You will be eaten by a grue”
Since you said it, I just had to do it – clicking along in Streetview the whole drive from Ranmoor to the car park by Stanage Plantation. Was not disappointed by the views. In fact, Streetview even included the footpath up to the top of the edge.
Spectacular mist effect. The Mapplethorpes siblings finally seem to face the problem of living by what their father said or did. I really hope the memory of that man will stop haunting them.
Here to concur that I like the way the mist looks. The lack of outlines where things touch the sky is a nice touch.
The sort of conditions where a technical puffer comes into its own
I am not familiar with Stanage but I have experienced a similar featureless void on the Great Orme.
I once experienced a similar featureless void with the entire state of Pennsylvania. I drove into a fog bank just outside Binghamton, and didn’t come out of it until West Virginia (I didn’t see Maryland, either, but crossing Maryland on I-81 is even at the best of times “blink and you’ll miss it”). I spent 250 miles crawling along at 40, following the tail lights of the truck ahead of me, because that was all I could see. I stopped for gas in Shippensburg, because I was familiar enough with the exit to be able to find my way to a gas station by braille, and standing at the pumps to fill my tank, I could not see the station except as a brighter direction in the fog.
So is the term ‘wet lettuce’ a reference to how everyone outside the UK learned the expression recently courtesy of your infamous six-week-PM, or does the writing actually predate that particular veggie-cam?
It’s a trad term for a wimp!
Spectacular mist effects, as others have said.
Lottie’s glee at Hetty’s moment of weakness is a little overdone; but then, by now, she knows Hetty better than we do, and that is not a situation to be envied. The moment will only be a moment; there are un-yeeted cattle lurking in every open space of sufficient size. BTW Hetty is short for Hester, I don’t know why I blanked on that the other day.
Yeah it’s hard to get more anglo than ‘Hester’ – maybe ‘Wendelin’ or ‘Thomasin’ get close
I think of Thomasin as an American name! I’ve never heard it here.
“Hester” is derived from the name of a Bronze-Age Middle Eastern fertility goddess – Ishtar. She wasn’t very anglo.
Hetty can also be short for Henrietta in a sort of nonsensical way. Nicknames are weird.
Whew, losing visibility on the moors like that is a recipe for walking off a sheer drop…
You mean…
… going over the Edge?
Thank you. I was going to be here all week, but that looks like a lynch mob gathering outside.