The sun under a bucket
Little Green Witch is definitely my new favourite character. I’ve been waiting months for this page to run so you can meet her. It is my fervent hope that she will return. I suppose only I can make that happen.
STEEPLE – A Scary Go Round Comic
by John Allison
No, she’s not jealous in the slightest. It’s not at all embarrassing when the audience upstages the guest.
Hmmmm, is halftone printing (first panel) a symbol of “sun under a bucket”? I’ll use that in my next Broadway revival of “Annie”.
Keeping her light under a bushel? This sounds very biblical. How ever did religion sneak its way in to this comic? Enquiring minds need to know.
When “Annie” was in tryouts, the lyrics went “Tomorrow etc.etc. you’re ALWAYS a day away” (instead of “only”). I thought that was a telling change.
Amazing how much difference the change makes to the whole tone of the song.
I interpreted that as viewing Billie’s aura.
Little Green Witch meets Wolfboy. YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO.
Yes please! Have Little Green Witch return as Billie’s assistant/obsessive little fan! It seems Debra understands what happened to Billie. But not that Clotilde and Ludmilla were to blame.
Yes, all four of these aspiring young sorceresses need to return soon (and hamster familiar of course)!
I sense an “All About Eve” vibe here, but only because I saw the movie recently.
Oh my goodness, thank you for pointing that out! I knew they were familiar (ha) but hadn’t put all the pieces together.
Oh, my read of this is that she _definitely_ knows it was them!
This would make them like one of these comical evil groups from the 70’s Hanna & Barbera or Tatsunoko cartoon series. Cool!
I was wondering if Debra Blight was a real witch, or just played one on television.
I’m not wondering anymore!
Yes, she has the VLORP of Veracity.
Nothing good ever came from a VLORP.
Isn’t that the sound of the TARDIS?
I think that’s more of a rrRRRrnnn rrRRRrrnnn rrRRRrnnn,
In the comics it was “VWORP”
The familiar is out of its habitat. Will we be treated to a hamsterdance?
“Ludmilla, Clotilde”
I forget, which one’s which? Or witch witches witch?
When I was a kid around 7-10 we lived in a tiny little very low rent town. In the winter at night before bed time all us neighborhood kids would play a game called “Witch Witch.” Note that our neighborhood had no street lights, and if the homes had porch lights they didn’t provide much illumination. So “Witch Witch” was basically just traditional “Hide and Seek” combined with “Tag” and the point was to find the darkest place to hide so you could jump out at the “it” person and scare them bad enough that you could escape and make it back to “home,” which was someone’s lighted porch. If they caught you, you became “it.”
We used to play pretty much the same thing, only we called it “Ghosts in the Graveyard.”
Oh, it WAS a hamster after all! John wasn’t fibbing (unless he sneakily went back and morphed the hedgehog in to something more Rotastak-compatible). Having said that, I noticed that after the hedgehog-hamster transformation was complete the microphone bearer came out of her trance.
Hampster!
Plot twist: It’s actually a naked mole rat in a hamster costume!
Bent hex, misapplied curse! Didn’t that come from those two young witches by way of a vacuum cleaner?
Nature abhors vacuum cleaners, so it’s no surprise that things went sideways
Those two young witches who are standing right there, reacting, while Debra Blight explains all of this…
Also, that green witch – Grotbags daughter?
I missed the beginning of steeple, can someone explain why maggles and blinda seem to have swapped churches?
Little Green Witch deserves her own spinoff series. Although it would probably work best as a series of occasional short stories that pop up here and there, Desmond Fishman style. Maybe shorter.
Sorry, that wasn’t meant as a response to you. As for your question, you’d have to read the first five issues of Steeple to get the full story (and they were released as actual physical comics, not webcomics), but one component, at least, was that Billie was accidentally the recipient of a curse cast by Ludmill and Clotilde, the two witches who have been conducting the interview here, through the medium of a be-hexed vacuum cleaner (they actually meant it for Mrs Clovis, but Billie used the vacuum cleaner first). Another factor was a mini-rapture incited by a renegade Christian group, which happened a couple of issues earlier- Maggie was drawn upwards, but Billie wasn’t, which was already planting seeds of doubt.
Thanks for the explanation, I feel I won’t properly understand it unless I manage to read it haha
I’d forgotten about the vacuum cleaner. was it the same one that Mrs C was using at the start of this chapter? Is that a case of Chekhov’s vacuum cleaner?
A series of facts made Maggie understand that she was not happy as a Satanit, while the same series of facts (including the sympathy for her of the head witch and her grup) made Billie doubt her vocation and think it was just a facade. For Billie the last straw was a hallucination where the devil told her that he was her master. But that hallucination was actually a prank that the two witches on this page prepared for Mrs. Clovis. In my opinion it was lucky for Billie, because this made her able to follow her true ambitions.
The interesting thing is that they’ve changed twice. Maggie was originally known as Naggy Maggie promoting every good cause before moving to the darkside as an antidote before returning to the good side albeit in a less naggy and judgmental way. Billie was originally a naughty person and then decided to mend her ways by being extra, super good but has changed yet again to someone who is a complex mixture of wickedness and saintliness. It’s all completely straightforward (no it isn’t).
Nice summation! And I hadn’t really pieced together how Maggie and Billie mirror each other.
Depending on your current bank balance, you could catch up here:
https://digital.darkhorse.com/series/1006/steeple
Little Green Witch deserves her own spinoff series. Although it would probably work best as a series of occasional short stories that pop up here and there, Desmond Fishman style. Maybe shorter.
It has nothing to do with “Steeple” and with John Allison, but a few months ago began a really nice strip on GoComics about a little witch, with green skin and a pointed hat, who just wants to not be bothered. It’s titled “Cursed”.
Yes, it pops up on my Facebook feed sometimes- keep forgetting the name.
And with a vlorp, she was gone.
Nothing can persuade me that isn’t the innovative logo of a startup called VLORP.
They started as an Internet telephony provider, but now have branched out into teleportation.
[ ] I understand that, as a user of the VLORP Public Beta, I assume full and sole responsibility for any and all risks that may arise from using a pre-release teleportation product that is still under active development, including but not limited to these known issues:
– legs in Osaka, spine in Wichita
– pancreas arrives upside-down
– blood gets there half a second before the rest of you
– difficulty maintaining Bluetooth connection
– Unexplained Sudden Tallness Syndrome
– soul is swapped with a tree frog
– relative speed compensation failure, resulting in your arriving at your destination while moving at 1.7 km/h
– battery gets uncomfortably warm
– Good Kirk/Evil Kirk scenario
1.7 km/h isn’t actually that bad – that’s taking 60 minutes to walk 21 city blocks, no worse than a good hard shove. I’d be more concerned about some of the other things on that list, or a position error: a few meters off target in any direction, particularly up or down on the z-axis…
Speaking of the z-axis — I don’t think it would be safe to assume the 1.7 km/h will always be confined to the x-y plane …
Potential side-effects not mentioned include those related to the conservation of energy, which may manifest as spontaneous temperature changes — using this product to take selfies atop Everest or even to avoid taking the stairs is strongly discouraged. (Apologies/credit to Larry Niven).