Round that bend
What has happened here, I don’t know? Let’s just be happy that Reverend Penrose has not been terribly injured in an automotive fracas.
STEEPLE – A Scary Go Round Comic
by John Allison
What has happened here, I don’t know? Let’s just be happy that Reverend Penrose has not been terribly injured in an automotive fracas.
Have to admit, I misinterpreted this page the first time I read it. I thought the other two vehicles were still heading for the Reverend’s car in that last panel. Then I noticed they were facing away, and realized somehow David’s car had avoided them both as it spun around.
“Skreeeeeeeeeeeeee” actually weren’t the tires but the tiger in the tank. It now is in a bad mood.
I’m still not convinced the VW bus isn’t a ghost vehicle.
They have to get around somehow.
ALL first-generation VW Microbusses are ghost cars.
Fortunately, it looks like the only injury was to the shrubbery.
The Knights of Ni are not amused.
They’ll just have to deal with it.
You said it.
AAAAAAAH! YOU SAID IT! OH NO, NOW I SAID IT! I SAID IT AGAIN! AND AGAIN! AAAAAAH!
That Kombi must be of infernal origin. There’s no way on earth a Kombi could tailgate anything other than the trolley boy in an Asda carpark.
I dunno, my mom had a ’71 with a 1600cc engine with dual carbs. She surprised a lot of people when lights went green.
I wish I could edit my posts. The engine was 1.8L not 1.6.
to me it looks like the rev was in another dimension in that car and passed through both cars without harm. Cursed car or blessed car?
BOTH!?
Jesus, take the wheel, indeed!
The reverend is not Catholic, of course, but otherwise I would think him a member of the Sacred Heart Auto League.
http://www.shsm.org/site/PageServer?pagename=autoleague
In 2021 (the last year for which data is available), fracas was indeed the number one cause of automobile-related deaths.
Could it be possible that the Kombi and the VW van are yet another manifestati9n of the ongoing struggle between good and evil?
Bloody hell I’m good
It would appear then that the reverend managed to put the gear into chaotic neutral.
That comment is excellent and merits some form of recognition. Apparently appearing on the Honours List isn’t what it used to be, but there must be something suitable.
I think NOT appearing on the honours list is the new appearing on the honours list
Is’t just me or in panel 3 it looks like the VW has a face? I don’t remember seeing Penrose so scared, even when he was fighting sea creatures. Great page!
I can easily imagine that one of the only things Reverend Penrose fears is dying in a mundane, run-of-the-mill manner. Disembowelment by a tentacled chthonic horror? Bring it on. Choking to death on a beer nut? (shudders)
The VW looks very afraid of the impending collision.
And I think the Rev is more afraid of thr wreck than the sea monsters because he feels he can defend himself from the monsters but is totally helpless against the expected wreck.
I’m loving the neon/vaporware color choices here.
I lost my mind one afternoon trying to work out why this colour scheme is described as “vaporwave”. I know the origins of the musical term but I couldn’t get back to the roots of it being attached to this palette. Then the other day s someone pointed out that it’s almost the old PC CGA colour palette. Because home computing was dominated by the Amiga et al in the UK (which had many more colours), I never saw this grisly palette. I don’t think I saw an IBM PC until I got to university.
I figure with a month or two more I can get down to ground zero of the nomenclature.
I’ve done some extensive work in it. Basically, it’s an updated version of old digital art. It’s not strictly the CGA color palette (though that plays strongly) it’s also this amazing lurid orange, too. The best way to think of how to translate is that you lose color (imagine taking an image from 16million colors to 256 for example) – in terms of gross color, it goes something like blue or green -> cyan, red -> magenta. I think in your case you’ve chosen to turn the deep blue of evening into something like an EGA purple, which (I think) is the right choice. There’s also something in vaporwave of ‘pinkening’ and ‘neonizing’ things, where you choose inappropriately pink-shifted or saturated tones to give the feeling of early digital art / marketing materials. Some vaporwave stuff uses windows 3.1 era visuals. You could probably add early fractal renders into vaporwave and lose no fidelity.
Thank you Garth! You’ll be excited to hear that at some point later in this story I use the most unpleasant fractal render imaginable.
Lurid orange is the best kind of orange.
I’m kind of seeing the dark blue as the not-quite-black of an old CRT with the brightness turned up too high.
Huh. TIL that “vaporwave” is a music thing. Up to now, I’d only ever heard it used in reference to the graphic style. I guess I unconsciously assumed it was in reference to *something* that used that style, but I never bothered to look up what that something was.
I knew it existed but never really thought about it until I read this brilliant article https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/monkees-michael-nesmith-vaporwave-714253/
You were doing better than me. I’d never heard of it at all.
Dr Ladysounds long ago convinced me that John Allison lives in a different and far more musically advanced world than mine.
It’s largely due to the album art for the seminal Vaporwave album Floral Shoppe (which contains what most people consider to be *the* Vaporwave track “リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー”) . That was so wildly popular in the scene that all the art elements got reused incessantly.
There’s also strong links to the pink/blue neon vibes of the Synthwave scene.
I see others have largely covered this, but I’m a huge geek in this area and felt compelled to weigh in.
Vaporwave as a term is a riff on “vaporware” that represents an evolution of the earlier term chillwave, which is essentially lo-fi pop music intended to evoke memories of the 1980’s. It’s very closely related to my own current favorite musical genre of synthwave, which could be considered the regular-fi version more inspired by traditional synthpop, and then there’s also nu-disco, whose meaning you may be able to guess at!
It’s all intended to evoke memories of the early digital era, in which absolutely lurid pinks and purples figured prominently, not just because of the limited palette of early monitors but because saturated pink/purple was also used internally by early computers as a code for transparent pixels, the rationale at the time being that it was the color least often found in actual photographs (which may be much less true these days). Highly saturated neon signs are also a big influence.
All fall under the umbrella of neo-retro, and one of the best musical experiences I feel one can have in the 2020’s is checking out the premier neo-retro channel, New Retro Wave: https://www.youtube.com/@NewRetroWave
I am not affiliated with this channel, but definitely believe it represents an antidote to the sins of our current auto-tuned pop universe, which has managed to reject melody and musicianship and pick up many of the sins of low-grade hip-hop while largely rejecting the social and racial justice that real hip-hop actually stood for before grifters and music execs and privatized prison execs seeking to make a buck got their hands all over it (this is actually a real thing).
I’m not a vaporwave expert – maybe some others could chime in with recs there – but I am getting to be a big old synthwave fan and would absolutely recommend The Midnight, Kalax, Wolfclub, and Dreamkid as some of the premier synthwave artists of our time, and Satin Jackets in nu-disco is absolutely unmissable.
Got a playlist here as a starter for neo-retro generally if anyone is interested.
This is not a self-promotion, I make zero from this, but it does make me happy and I hope it might make others happy as well.
Peace!
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLovW846Yw_N0FYY9B1r1glPWcJJTLtmFX
SKREE (universal sound of spinning the eff out)
I think the Rev is now dead but doesn’t realise it yet. The rest of the tale will be his return from the underworld.
Orpheus breaks off his rearview mirror so as not to get a glimpse of Eurydice.
Come on man, a joke about fuzzy Eurydice hanging from the mirror was right there
“I’m bracing!” *crash*
Frankly, that manner of bracing does not look like an improvement to me.
I wonder whether the reverend got an Australian car because those drive on the underside of the road.
Someone please tell me that the Hyundai lustre was not impaired by this confrontation!
Even if the Rev and the car both got off without a scratch, it seems that “collisions” lost an “i” in the commotion.
Thank you, correction has been applied and the people responsible fired.
A moose once bit my sister…
He said fired, not sacked, though. Perhaps the people responsible for firing, rather than sacking, should themselves be sacked (or fired, as the case may be).