Bad Machinery by John Allison for October 08, 2024

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    66steve  3 months ago

    Is that wall breaking stare the only instance of such in the bobbinsverse?

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    John Campbell  3 months ago

    Shelley Winters is kind of the central figure of the entire Tackleford universe. She had the first line in the first panel of the first strip of Bobbins, she’s in the most recent strip of John Allison’s current comic, and she’s made at least cameo appearances in basically everything else in between. But she’s been conspicuously absent from Bad Machinery, despite several of the characters having close personal connections to her.

    We saw Shelley’s arms in the flashback to Amy’s wedding in the last case, and her Maserati appeared at the beginning of “Modern Men”, but this is the first time in Bad Machinery that we’ve actually seen her face, below Mike’s hand in the first panel and to the left of Lottie’s head in the fifth. Erin, of course, is on the other side of Lottie’s head.

    As I mentioned yesterday, Shelley spent much of the latter part of Scary Go Round working at the Cormorant, until she was fired at the end of “The Great Tackleford Show”. Erin’s a decade or so younger than Shelley; she was 16 and a student at Griswald’s during that period… until, at the end of “Super Crisis Quests”, she was sucked into Hell, and due to metaphysical stuff, everyone left on Earth forgot that she’d ever existed. If Mike was aware that Shelley had a sister, he forgot her like everyone else did.

    Erin eventually made her way back to Earth, but still no one remembered her, and she didn’t reconnect with her family, because she couldn’t bear to have them not recognize her. So during the period Erin was working here, she was the only person on Earth who remembered that she was Shelley’s sister.

    Erin reconnected with Shelley at the end of the Bobbins story “Into the Woods”, and broke the memory block, but was almost immediately thereafter forced to go back to Hell. She’s found her way back to Earth again now. We haven’t seen her in Bad Machinery, but she appeared before this point in the parallel Bobbins story, “Hard Yards”.

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    Mr. Organization  3 months ago

    “I want to be in the room where it happens…”

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    scyphi26  3 months ago

    News reporting can be like that sometimes, all right.

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    6turtle9  3 months ago

    That sure looks like Shauna in the background of panel one.

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    Aladar30 Premium Member 3 months ago

    Mike is unfair. Erin wasen’t so bad, exactily like Shelley wasen’t so good.

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