You have a week to wait until the next Steeple story, please use this week to get any admin you have outstanding out of the way. I’m talking balancing your chequebook, organising your desk drawers, cleaning the back seat of your car. Use the comments for this page to drum up emotional support for your toil and I’ll see you on November 6th for our Parish Notices (some very important information) before comics start again on the 9th.
Christmas With Clovis
I regret to inform you, tender reader, that Billie and Maggie are pickled. Updates on this story are three times a week, M-W-F, though you get four updates on Christmas week. At that point I will have made as many Steeple pages in 2020 as I made in 2019, and will be permitted to enter the “Odinsleep” (or similar).
I’m not 100% sure that panel 7 isn’t the most shameful in my canon. There were two versions of it, one emphasises madness, the other provides a clear line of action. By the time you read this I may have implemented a “third way”.
There’s something about this comic that makes me think Reverend Penrose isn’t actually wearing an electric blanket and Mrs Clovis wasn’t playing a huge church organ.
Billie is hungover, Maggie seems… barely to be showing any signs of strife. What a diabolical state of affairs. I’ve seldom had to depict so wretched a display. Hopefully things will pick up a bit tomorrow. Christmas day.
Billie and Maggie emerge into a thorny and painful world. It’s a cruel day when there’s no breakfast in it.
For those not familiar, Space Raiders are an inexpensive corn snack with a truly violent pickled onion (or “beef”) flavour. They were a staple of the school vending machine throughout my education. The price rose from 10p to 15p during that time, reflecting really good value for money in exchange for violent temporary halitosis. They occupied the same impulse purchase zone as the Freddo Frog chocolate bar*. Though I saw a Freddo Frog for 85p in Jordan’s Mill café at the weekend, which represents a serious gouge among otherwise reasonably priced “fare”. * Freddo Frog note: if Cadbury’s (never “Cadbury”) wish to hire Desmond Fishman as the new face of the Freddo, I believe a deal can be struck though it is a deal which sees the chocolatier walk back the recent loss of the the possessive suffix from their name. [Mandela effect note, 2/8/2021: Alan’s name was amended to Les because at a future date I forgot what his name was and it was easier to go back and change this comic]
Today’s comic features recourse to the red-green gradient, the most forbidden of colour schemes. When I first started as a designer, some PC software found the notion of this gradient so abhorrent that instead of a muddy brown in the middle, it would manifest purest white. Of course, times have changed since 1998, we have quantum computing and iPhone 12, and a red-green gradient can finally be perceived by the human eye.