Axe please
Penrose may have chosen exactly the wrong person to accompany him on his mission of beast egg destruction. Maggie’s conscience (see Steeple volume 1, chapter 5) is as big as her hair (ie massive). — Colours by Sammy Borras
Penrose may have chosen exactly the wrong person to accompany him on his mission of beast egg destruction. Maggie’s conscience (see Steeple volume 1, chapter 5) is as big as her hair (ie massive). — Colours by Sammy Borras
Maggie would make a lovely mother to a small brood of eldritch horrors
So you’ve met all my nieces and nephews?
Ah, so the horrors from the deep ransacked Tom’s pavilion for nesting materials! Good idea, bad taste.
I’m sure they’ll be just adorable when they hatch!
And that they will in no way, shape or form eat all the teenagers at Make-Out Beach!
(This joke shamelessly stolen from Gail Simone’s Twitter feed)
Ahhhhh, Maggie! Don’t you know that no good deed goes unpunished?
As much as I regard both of these completely fictional characters I’ve never actually met as friends, I’m rooting for Maggie here.
Penrose and Pendennis: eyes bugging out contest!
When doesn’t the Reverend use an ax for every action? I bet he spreads butter on his toast with a tiny butter ax.
OK, now when I get back to blacksmithing and woodworking I will definitely make one of those.
Salad fork, soup spoon, butter axe.
Except for the cube I’m currently using I keep my butter in the freezer. Like my Grandmother taught me. When I bring out a new one a butter ax might be useful.
Fun fact: My Grandmother had a superstition. She thought that if anything bad happened it was because you didn’t have enough butter in the house. As a result, she usually had between twelve and fifteen pounds of butter in her freezer at all times.
She also thought if you had any margarine in the house you were a prat.
It took Fred Kummerow from the ’50s, when he definitively proved that margarine was poison, until ’17 for it to be banned, in the US. All the ills blamed on butter turned out to be caused by trans fats and sugar.
(Sorry that this isn’t funny. But your nan was right.)
Axes are tools of limitless versatility. Shave, change diapers, clean your nails, paint a fence, make a dress, remove a splinter, gall bladder surgery, re-sole a shoe, change your motor oil, arrest a criminal, virtually anything you can think of and more. All with the same axe!
YEEEEEEESS! GO MAGGIE! Penrose must be stopped! These eggs are innocent and how can he be so sure that the mother will go away and that she won’t just decide to ravage the city as revenge? I love these two more and more ♡.
Am I the only one who is fully in support of the Reverend here? Smash the eggs and have an epic fight scene with the monster? Hopefully with a bit of town-ravaging monster revenge?
But if the last town in the southwest with intact roofing gets ravaged, there will be nowhere to film Clotted Crime, and then the nanas will rampage and the last tenuous connections holding together the UK’s social fabric will collapse. Which is all too much like real life for it to be a desirable outcome in the Tackleverse.
Yes! Sorry Pete, but you need to think at the consequences.
You can’t murder them!
They’re BABIES!!!!!!!
Or, hear me out, OMELETTES.
Oooh! And a bit of sausage, oi?
And the Easter Bunny hides chickens.
What does she think he does all the time?
I’d presume she thought that he battles large, dangerous creatures who are capable of fighting back (after all, when playing along with the idea that she might one day replace Penrose, she wanted Mrs. Clovis to help her design “battle armor”). The knowledge that he’s willing to smash defenseless eggs might be new to her.
It might also make her wonder if her predecessor Billie has known this about Penrose all along and doesn’t have a problem with it. It might even make her ask herself if SHE’D have had a problem with it prior to “changing sides.”
The [paraphrased] credo of Satanism is “do what you want to do.” “Do what you NEED to do” is something else entirely. It seems that Maggie feels a “need” to protect the eggs, but does Penrose kill “abominations” because he NEEDS to…or just because he WANTS to? Because, if the latter, whether or not they actually pose a threat wouldn’t really matter to him.
As I recall, in the first volume of Steeple, Billie pointed out to the Rev that at least one of the sea creatures was not a threat, and in fact it wanted to commune with the congregation. It seems Penrose did not learn from this experience. The hymn does say “All creatures great and small”, David.
Sea abominations? What is the worst that could happen
Was that on named… Desmond?
One, not on. Bleah.
Des may be a “creature great and small”, but I don’t think he manages “all things bright and beautiful” or “… wise and wonderful”.
I initially misread the paper beneath Maggie as “Merch of Satan” and now can’t stop wondering what such a flyer would feature
Your basic employment shrine to Baphomet, moth capes….
…
It took me several re-reads NOT to see that, now I’m disappointed.
I am certain the Church of Satan sells merch of Satan.
I think it’s a flyer from the very pavilion whose destruction tipped Penrose off in the first place. And now Maggie is 100% behind it (the flyer). IRONY. 🙂
“I have form” is a perfectly delightful quote for a comic book character to utter.
Am I alone in wanting a Sir David Attenborough guest appearance now?
No, it would be delightful
In between reading the strip and consulting IMDB, I misremembered the name as RICHARD Attenborough. Which, since he played a guardian of dinosaur eggs, is at least as appropriate.
“I *destroy* big weird eggs, I don’t *preserve* them!”
Ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s form no more …
“A Man Called Spider” is the Spaghetti Western version of Spider-Man.
Spider the tree-dwelling eco-warrior? Do I hear the brass tones of a certain cobblestoned street of the North wafting down memory lane? Now that would be an immensely enjoyable crossover.
Maybe it was Spider Stacy, tinwhistle player for the Pogues.
Oh Maggie has now returned to her roots, this will get good.
Ah.
Spider sounds like an environmentalist whose rugged hotness is eclipsed only by his conscientious objection to showering.
Oddly, we have known a man for 35 years whose mama really did name him Spider.
How many legs did he have?
Just the three.
This page, like most of the pages in this story, is magnificently drawn.
Where did the ax go? I saw Maggie had it, then she darted, and it isn’t on the heap in front of her.
Flung into the bay
I was wondering that, too. The either dropped it in the boat, or dropped it in the water, I guess.
I assume she dropped it because neither of them want to have an axe fight with the other.
I just hope she dropped it in the boat rather than overboard. The Reverend might go into withdrawal if he’s separated from his axe for too long.
For is it not said that the road to heck is paved with good intentions?
Nobody ever says what kind of intentions the road to heaven is paved with, though. And it HAS to be intentions for BOTH roads, live by the metaphor, die by the metaphor. 😉
No, that’s the road to Hell. The road to Heck is paved with generally inoffensive indifference.
What’s the opposite of “heck,” then, and what is ITS road paved with? 😉
There is no opposite to heck. If you’re in the universe that has heck, your Metaphysics was not installed correctly. There are no known fixes to this issue. Contact the manufacturer for recall.
In any case, I think both these friends-turned-adversaries are motivated by good intentions here.
Looks as though Penrose might have been better off recruiting Tom as backup. Tom would be glad to mete out “vengeance” for his wrecked pavilion. In fact, Tom might be into extreme violence for its own sake.
Plus, we already know how much Tom enjoys smashing eggs.
His egg-strangling tendencies aside, Tom doesn’t seem like a guy who enjoys getting his hands dirty. He seems to prefer to delegate or manipulate others to handle the actual violence so that he can watch from a safe and comfortable distance.
Which to be fair, is literally all Penrose is asking for, well with maybe a slightly loose definition of “a safe and comfortable distance” anyways. Though I’m not sure he’d trust Tom with his axe, or likely any axe, so kind of a moot point.
I don’t think that anything that involves climbing into a small boat with Reverend Penrose and an axe would qualify as “safe” or “comfortable” in Tom’s book.
No axes, please, we’re British.
We know that Penrose is accepting payment for allowing the TV crew to film on his church’s property, and no word yet on any interest in Tom’s church’s property. I wonder if the temptation to refuse to be as “mercenary” as Penrose (and to repeatedly rub that in Penrose’s face) would prompt him to allow such permission free of charge. After all, shouldn’t a church be open and welcome to *everyone* free of charge?. Sooner or later, money gets spent, but needling his nemesis over theoretically “un-Christian” behavior would reap potential life-long rewards.
I’m still looking forward to learning more about Maggie’s mysterious letter, but I don’t mind waiting. Which is fortunate inasmuch as I have no choice. 😉 Near as I can tell, she hasn’t seemed to be particularly troubled since the night she received it, though. Perhaps she didn’t get quite drunk enough and thus hasn’t yet read it herself. Or maybe she has been troubled and I’m just dense. Whichever.
Or she got too drunk and just plain forgot about it.
The timing’s a little unclear, but I think she may have received the latter just the previous night. I think we’re still on the day after. That’s certainly a short enough time that she may simply not have gotten around to reading it yet. Especially if it’s something she really doesn’t want to read.
Foreshadowing! Your sign of quality literature.