Bad Machinery by John Allison for July 19, 2023

Destroy History!

When did this originally come out?

Well, they mostly put time back together. Not bad for amateurs, but they certainly made some work for the Ministry of History.

Don’t worry though, their music was still legendary, and in the end that was what mattered most. :P

When asked whether he were a Mod or a Rocker, John Lennon replied, “I’m a Mocker.”

I like that Ringo’s name didn’t require a feminine version.

I love this lineup.

What a beautiful new history!

Hmmm, I wonder if Santa is now Mother Christmas.

Can’t wait to hear the Beetles play “Larry in the Sky Playing Footie.”

As our late Queen once said, “Memories may vary!”

Good thing they double czeched the spelling on the past panel sign; I once put out a sign saying “Satan stop here” which caused a hell of a contretemps, and no mistake.

The sixties? I’m there for the blue beat.

And Judy Lennon’s boyfriend is Yoko Ono.

I think the Beatles are some kind of temporal nexus. They seem to be involved in a lot of time shenanigans in this world. Back in Scary Go Round, Shelley and Amy used the Time Teapot that Tim had invented (based on the premise that a watched pot never boils) to travel back to 1840, where Shelley gained fame and fortune by preforming (not a typo) Beatles songs. But then it didn’t happen because Tim found out and used a backup teapot to travel back to before Shelley and Amy went back in time and stopped them from doing it.

Now we have the mystery girls transforming the Beatles into the Beetles with their shenanigans in 1960.

Later (in some sense*), Shelley, under the auspices of the British Ministry of History, will go back to 1963 to attempt to restore the Beatles to their rightful place in history, in the Destroy History storyline “NEMS”. Apparently she will have been successful, because the Ringo Starr sing-a-long Billie holds at the Church of Satan in Steeple appears to be the familiar Ringo.

The tenses get confusing here, because Shelley’s “present” in Destroy History was when she was in London, working at the Ministry of History, in the three-year gap between the end of Scary Go Round and the beginning of Bad Machinery (which we’ll be revisiting in the next couple of pages), before her current gig as a wildly successful children’s book author. However “NEMS” was posted years after Bad Machinery ended, and the period Shelley travels to is later than the one the mystery girls visited. Also, “NEMS” is unfinished, and John Allison has described the second part of it as impossible to draw.

I love the Pam “Dylan” verse!

For some reason all the males we know are female Then are female performers now male? that is one heavy shift of sexes.