scarygoround
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Bad Machinery: The Big Hiatus
🕑 Added 2022-09-22 17:05:05 +0000 UTCAs Bad Machinery went on, and I was working on it in tandem with writing Giant Days, I started to struggle to write two "cases" a year, so I began to alternate them with lighter, easier to put together material. In 2016, between cases 9 and 10 I did a story called the Big Hiatus, where I tried to work exclusively in the Japanese yonkoma format. It's a format built for formulaic gag strips but I pushed it as hard as I could to be more visually sophisticated, as I thought there was something in the vertical format - I had experimented with it in Robert Cop and Bobbins.horse first. The results were mixed - this is an improvised story with no pre-plotting, and I can really smell the difference at this point, but like a lot of experiments that I didn't feel worked, looking back after six years, it has some exciting energy - a bridge to things I did later, and some roads I never went down again. I pulled the "camera" back a lot to cram as much into each panel as possible.
It's not collected with the other Bad Machinery stories on GoComics, so I've stuck it as a PDF at the bottom of this post. I should have a couple more PDFs from my lost "back pages" over the next few weeks.
Comments
Linus Lee
That was fun. Poor Sonny. Love the bit about the wasps nest.
Pierpaolo Di Camillo
I'm sure I've read this story some years ago. But I'd totally forgotten mostly of it and I can't understand why. It's a good story with important developments. Memory is just weird.
