Recent Comments

1. about 2 hours ago on Bad Machinery

   John Allison posted a PDF of the abandoned roughs for the second part of NEMS on his Patreon a while back. Recently he made that post public for anyone to view.

   I have to admit, I couldn’t figure out what was going on in half of it. But apparently Esther fixed everything. Yay!

2. about 19 hours ago on Bad Machinery

   We don’t see a lot of it in Bad Machinery, though if you pay close attention, it’s apparent that the part of town Shauna lives in is not as nice as, for example, Lottie’s neighborhood. There was a bit back in “Team Spirit” where Shauna was walking home through the bad part of town, and some in flashback in this case, but mostly it’s not something that’s real obvious unless you read Scary Go Round.

   Shauna (and Darren and Ella) first appeared towards the end of Scary Go Round, in the story “The Estate”, in which Desmond Fishman wandered down onto the Swarbrick and got accosted by the gang of thugs Darren was hanging out with, and we got a pretty thorough introduction to the upbringing Shauna’s talking about here. There was a point where Sarah commented that Lottie was the only thing standing between Shauna and motherhood at 14.

   But things really turned around for them after Dan came into their lives (and, frankly, after Darren went into “fashion”), which happened in the three-year gap between the end of Scary Go Round and the beginning of Bad Machinery. He brought a solid blue-collar professional income into the family, which is letting them pull themselves out of the pit of poverty they were mired in.

   Note that the bit we saw of Shauna’s home life in the dark timeline in “Forked Road” suggests that, however poorly it may have gone for Amy and Ryan, the Wickles were actually a lot better off, financially, in that timeline. But the girls don’t seem to have noticed that Shauna’s circumstances had changed. Probably they were too distracted by the temporal anomaly she was dating.

3. 3 days ago on Bad Machinery

   I don’t think Lottie ever even got to collect on the bet.

4. 3 days ago on Bad Machinery

   Roll for initiative, Blossom.

5. 3 days ago on Bad Machinery

   I want to make a reference, but we haven’t gotten there yet.

6. 4 days ago on Bad Machinery

   Blossom casts sheer top at Shauna! Shauna saves for half damage.

7. 5 days ago on Bad Machinery

   I’m pretty sure it’s only the queen who gets to just shoot whoever she wants.

   The bottom row here is new, added for the published version.

   It’s a 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor Sentinel ambulance conversion, the same car the Ghostbusters’ Ecto-1 was made from.

8. 5 days ago on Bad Machinery

   I think Claire likes Lottie being horrible to her, because over at the Bad Machinery site, five years later, Claire is waiting faithfully in the rain for Lottie to come. Her long wait is nearly over; new Solver comics starting June 7th.

9. 7 days ago on Bad Machinery

   You may recall that the girls’ meddling in history in “The Case of the Forked Road” resulted in “the Beatles” being replaced by our familiar Beetles — Paula McCartney, Judy Lennon, Georgina Harrison, and Ringo Starr.

10. 9 days ago on Bad Machinery

    It’s so hard to be yourself that no one else can do it.