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1. 1 day ago on Bad Machinery

   This is it — the last Bad Machinery strip. We end with the severed alliance being reforged in Claire’s fire.

   The mystery kids appeared after this in the Bobbins story “Hard Yards”, where they investigated “disaster man” Tim Jones and his father (actually his daughter — it was complicated). Claire got promoted to full mystery girl. Go-Kart Conspiracy had their debut performance at the baby shower for Shelley and Tim’s new daughter, Peggy. Blossom was their drummer. Lottie attempted to veto that, but Claire’s band runs on the “one woman, one vote” principle. Claire is the one woman; she has the one vote.

   After that, there was a three-part story, “Wen-Tack”/“Parents”/“The Great Unboxing”, which was… kind of Bad Machinery, but not quite. All of the mystery kids appeared in it, but only Mildred and Linton had big parts. Mostly it focused on the Wen-Tack Action Group, a group of first-years Mildred assembled to help her open the incomplete Wen-Tack road. John A. decided he didn’t like it and took it down, but has said that the events still happened.

   As a result of the terrible chain of events Mildred set in motion, Griswalds lost its sixth form, and the mystery kids got scattered to different schools for the rest of their school career.

   The next we saw of them, Lottie was 18 and being framed for murder in “Wicked Things”. That’s continued into the Lottie-and-Claire vehicle Solver, currently running over at badmachinery com, which at the moment seems poised for a flashback to Lottie and Claire’s international mystery-solving in their Wendlefield Girls’ High days.

   Lottie and Shelley also crossed over with the Cornwall-set Steeple in “Author Unknown”, which can be found over at scarygoround com, along with the web-published Giant Days issues and some of the new Bobbins strips. Shauna, meanwhile, has her own print comics, “The Great British Bump-Off” and, out soon, “Kill or Be Quilt”.

2. 1 day ago on Bad Machinery

   Somewhere nearby, Pepper is wondering where that high-pitched squeal is coming from.

3. 2 days ago on Bad Machinery

   That’s Shelley Winters on Lottie’s tablet in the last panel. Presumably Lottie is trying to give the Sewerman General to her. Shelley has a notable history of going for large, muscular men, so it seems like he might be right up her alley. However, I believe it’s the prospect of a Karen/Mike romance that she’s reacting to. Shelley is well familiar with both of them.

   She worked with Mike at the Cormorant for a while, until the Great Tackleford Show incident got her fired and him impaled by a giant bee. Earlier in this story, Mike described Shelley as the worst reporter he’d ever worked with. Fortunately, she’s a much better children’s book writer.

   Shelley’s been Lottie’s friend and mentor for seven or eight years now, so while we haven’t actually seen much of Shelley and Karen interacting, and Lottie has described Karen as “never a detail-orientated parent”, presumably she at least knows who this strange woman hauling her teenage daughter off in a Maserati is.

   We don’t actually see the Karen/Mike romance, but next time we saw Mike, in the apocryphal story “The Great Unboxing”, he was living in Karen’s house. By the time of Solver, he’s still there. In the most recent Solver story, Lottie has described Mike as her step-dad, but I’m not sure if there was actually a wedding involved, or if it’s just convenient shorthand for, “my mother’s long-term live-in boyfriend”.

   Only one more strip to go.

4. 3 days ago on Bad Machinery

   Erin’s not crazy. She’s just had a very weird life, even by Tackleford standards.

   She grew up as little sister to Shelley Winters, then at 16 had her Boy stolen by her best friend, accidentally drank a mad-science potion that turned her into a giant glamorous Amazon, was hypnotized into marrying the 19th-century occultist who was cursed to be headmaster of their school and was immediately thereafter sucked into Hell, widowed, and then fought her way to a seat on the Bone Throne, from which she reigned over Hell as its Queen for the next three years before defeating Xaffej the Indefatigable, guardian of the Great Fiery Elevator, by tricking him into scorning her, and returning to Earth, where nobody could remember that she existed, acquiring a terrible car (rust in peace, Phyllis) and a job at the Cormorant, dealing with the mystery kids’ weirdnesses and her coworker turning into a giant walnut of despair, getting a better job in London but being lured back to Tackleford because her sister’s baby-daddy’s mad science project was summoning devil bears, reconnecting with her Boy only to have him die in her arms, bargaining with the Grim Reaper to save his life but being exiled back to Hell as a result, though not before reuniting with her sister and saving the day with her demoness powers, only to have The Boy get himself killed again a few months later and join her in Hell as a horse, after which they faced a rebellion in Hell, escaped back to Earth again, got rescued from wendigos in an arctic wasteland and then put on trial by Santa Claus, returned to Tackleford again, fought Mad Terry’s mum in a forgotten space behind the supermarket, and then she got a job editing the Wendlefield Packet, threw a brick through the window of the Cormorant and then became its editor, and… I guess threatening her unborn niece’s time-traveling half-sister who was disguised as her own grandfather with a crowbar hasn’t happened yet.

5. 3 days ago on Bad Machinery

   So, an hour later, here we are at Copper Edge Self Store. In panel 2, Erin has a very long-winded way of saying “yes”.

   Lottie’s sweatshirt has the German for “Don’t Forget”. I assume it was made by the same people who produced the “Eating Forbidden” one she was wearing in “Fire Inside”, and that Claire has been wearing in recent Solver strips.

   Erin’s sister Shelley having a baby was the main plot thread that ran through the parallel Bobbins story, “Hard Yards”. It started shortly after the end of “Into the Woods”, in the February before “Space is the Place”, when Shelley discovered her pregnancy courtesy of Mordawwa’s demonic senses, and ran all the way through to her new daughter Peggy’s baby shower, on December 18th of the upcoming school year. The baby shower was a full-cast event, with pretty much all the surviving major characters and many of the minor ones from Bad Machinery, Bobbins, Scary Go Round, and even Esther back from Giant Days. There was time travel and gunplay and almost a marriage proposal, and the girls performed in their new band. Claire got promoted to full mystery girl, by unanimous acclaim. I think it was intended to wrap up the whole Tackleford universe, but fortunately it hasn’t.

   I think Erin actually likes Lottie. She just has unusual ways of showing affection.

   I’m not really sure what makes this a “black site”.

   According to Goblin Santa Claus, Erin is 50.1% nice. Within the margin of error.

6. 3 days ago on Bad Machinery

   There was a deleted strip that led into this one, which I think was cut because of too much Shelley Winters content. It was a single-row, five-panel strip, and originally ran between yesterday’s strip and the day before.

   Panel 1 (Lottie sitting on a bench in the Grote garden, looking at her buzzing phone):

   LOTTIE: “Number withheld. Hm. Time for some artisan SHORT SHRIFT.”

   Panel 2 (elsewhere, a vague figure in chiaroscuro talks on the phone):

   LOTTIE (over phone): “Hallo?”

   FIGURE: “Copper Edge Self Store in an hour. Don’t be late.”

   Panel 3 (Grote garden, Lottie on her phone):

   LOTTIE: “Is this LILY LIMPWRIST of the Easthampton Limpwrists? How’s dear old STRAUB?”

   Panel 4 (back to the figure, but in full color, revealing that it’s Erin Winters, in her sister Shelley’s kitchen. Shelley herself, about six months pregnant, has appeared behind Erin, holding up a saucepan and soup container):

   SHELLEY: “Do you want soup for lunch?”

   ERIN (aside, to Shelley): “It’s much too hot for soup, you pervert!”

   Panel 5 (Grote garden):

   LOTTIE: “Erin, this sinister phone call is in the bottom three of all time. You own that now.”

7. 3 days ago on Bad Machinery

   (Though I admit, her parallel parking was technically perfect.)

8. 3 days ago on Bad Machinery

   She did recently almost kill everyone with carjacking and unlicensed driving.

9. 3 days ago on Bad Machinery

   Shauna is the least nutty, but probably also the most dangerous. With the exception of Claire, who covers it up well, but I think is actually both the most dangerous and the most nuts.

10. 4 days ago on Bad Machinery

    That is the car in question in the background of the first panel. You may recall from when they were first investigating him that Hugh lives just around the corner from Mildred.

    Apparently Mildred was quite taken with her stolen car (or it was quite taken by her), because she’s currently driving the electric version, a Nissan Leaf, even in the same light blue.

    Jack is much too delicate for Mildred.