The John Allison-verse: Steeple, Giant Days, Scary Go Round, Bad Machinery

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > BSS: Bisexual Super Son > The John Allison-verse: Steeple, Giant Days, Scary Go Round, Bad Machinery

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Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Hello Allisonverse thread! I've been posting Scary-Go-Round over in the Newspaper Comics thread (since Bad Machinery and Steeple get posted there as well), doing 3-4 strips per day so people can read through the origins of Tackleford start to finish. Saoshyant PMed me and asked if I would mind posting it here as well, and I thought that would be an excellent idea.

For people who have read SGR before, we've just finished the arc that introduces Natalie. If you haven't read SGR before, or you have and you want to catch up, here's a link to my posts in the other thread, starting with the very first SGR strip: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4020900&userid=182533&perpage=40&pagenumber=2#post533850809

I'm trying to keep the pacing as sane as possible without absolutely flooding threads with SGR, particularly because we've entered the period where Allison wasn't 100% sure whether or not he wanted to stick with 4 panels per day or 6. Once we get to the point where he settles on 6, I'll probably scale it back to 3 strips a day. At that pace we'll get through the entire run in about a year and a half. Starting tomorrow: Amy gets a job!

# ¿ Oct 25, 2023 02:05

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 14:58

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

Oh, lol. This has quite suddenly reminded me that there was a time that SGR was supposed to not be about Shelley Winters. She was supposed to stay in Bobbins!

Mad to imagine.

Yeah, I can't even begin to think of what that would look like.

Scary Go Round (November 24-27, 2003)

drat, Len. That's cold.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2023 22:57

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Yeah, we're going to need some double-length issues if we want to wrap all of Steeple up in a nice little bow. I get the feeling we might get some spin-off wrap-up issues down the line though.

Scary Go Round (November 28-December 3, 2003)

# ¿ Oct 26, 2023 20:49

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (December 4-9, 2003)

I always love the things written on Hugo's menu board. "Xmas Trimmings" is a goodun.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2023 22:30

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (December 10-15, 2003)

# ¿ Oct 29, 2023 02:05

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (December 16-19, 2003)

# ¿ Oct 30, 2023 00:31

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (December 22-25, 2003)

Fun elevator fact: Many modern elevators will detect you pressing too many buttons at once and enter "nuisance mode" where it resets your inputs if you punch in more than one or two floors in a row. This was designed to stop children from gumming up the elevator, but it would also work as designed on Amy.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2023 21:55

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (December 26-31, 2003)

# ¿ Nov 1, 2023 01:18

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (January 1-4, 2004)

Happy New Year! Or, uh, I guess... Happy November? New chapter starts tomorrow, starring everyone's favourite secret agent Fallon Young. Also a slight art style change to be a bit more cartoony in the characters' proportions that iirc gets reverted after a few weeks of strips.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2023 23:38

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

We start the first Robotania arc today with something a bit different: the incredibly awesome goon The_Other sent me all of Allison's retrospective commentary from the PDF collections to post at the start of each chapter. A few of the books collapse related chapters together for a single intro (the next two, Isle of Wight and Bad Religion, for example).

John Allison posted:

This is a very broad story, perhaps my broadest. If you don't like broad humour, I apologise for some rather broad concepts, including (but not limited to) robotic "love tourism".

Having spent nine weeks writing about a lonely French girl who dies in a caravan fire, this can probably be viewed as a cry for help. For at least six hours I toyed with renaming the comic "Lost Bicycle" and making the website entirely pink.

At the start of a year I suffer a terrible crisis of confidence about how things are and how they should be. A new year is a challenge to me akin to a polar bear offering me out for a fight. So I commenced 2004 drawing in a completely different art style that polarised (polar-bear-ised) opinion. After about three weeks I had defeated the smelly artic bear of my own fear and gone back to how I was doing before. So for the consistency of your entertainment, I have redrawn these comics for continuity of presentation. [editor's note: we will not see this as I pulled the originals from the internet archive]

Beware the POLAR BEAR of your own fears, readers!

Scary Go Round (January 5-8, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 2, 2023 22:54

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (January 9-14, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 4, 2023 00:40

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (January 15-20, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 4, 2023 23:19

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (January 21-25, 2004)

"Busfucker" really rolls off the tongue. busfucker busfucker busfucker busfucker

# ¿ Nov 6, 2023 01:11

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (January 26-29, 2004)

Robovend, we hardly knew ye.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2023 23:18

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (January 30-February 4, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 7, 2023 21:53

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (February 5-8, 2004)

The second half of this arc starts tomorrow! Bad Religion is the story of the lovely duo of Amy and Shelley fixing poor ol' Ryan Beckwith. At least, as much as they can within the confines of even the Tackleford reality.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2023 22:04

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

John Allison posted:

Hopefully this story gives people a bit of closure, and leaves them with something to think about. I have nothing against organised religion, but if someone made me slick back my hair with cooking lard and worship someone called "Wayne", I would ask questions - and so should you.

Having delayed this very book you're reading now because of a problem*, I was able to sew up all the stories for you in a neat, tidy and orderly fashion when finally compiling the volume. What happened to Tim? What about Ryan? After you read the pages that follow this one, you will hopefully know. And hopefully you'll have sufficient new questions that next year we can do this all over again.

Goodbye!

*Worldwide cuss and sass shortage.

Scary Go Round (February 9-13, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 9, 2023 22:19

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (February 13-17, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 10, 2023 23:00

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (Feburary 18-23, 2004)

Goddammit, Hugo.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2023 00:55

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (February 24-27, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 13, 2023 00:57

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Gravitas Shortfall posted:

Yeah he could have very easily stuck with the weirdly stiff vector puppet style and gone nowhere.

Yeah. It won't be long until we get some hand-drawn SGR showing up but his Bad Machinery era style doesn't start to come together until like, 2007 or so.

Scary Go Round (March 1-4, 2004)

First appearance: Wayne. Yeah, that's all I got.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2023 03:41

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (March 5-10, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 15, 2023 01:16

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (March 11-16, 2004)

Well'p. RIP Fallon, I'm sure with this strip's track record of killing characters off we'll never see her again :v:

# ¿ Nov 15, 2023 21:55

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (March 17-22, 2004)

take it eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeasy

# ¿ Nov 17, 2023 00:48

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (March 23-27, 2004)

:O

Picking up tomorrow: A slight format change to 6 panels per day, and a tale of the mystical Isle of Wight.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2023 02:37

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (March 28-31, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 19, 2023 01:43

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (April 1-5, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 20, 2023 02:16

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Yeah, he's got some horniness, but he's funny about it. I think it's what helped set him apart from other artists in the nightmare of the 2000s webcomic sphere who clearly had a case of the horndog going on. It never went too far and was almost always just for cheekiness.

Scary Go Round (April 6-8, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 21, 2023 02:47

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (April 9-13, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 22, 2023 03:12

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (April 14-16, 2004)

Well, that was quick! Tomorrow we start a side story idiosyncratically called Count My Toes. It's a brief return to the 4-panel-a-day format and also a brief jaunt into John Allison changing the font to something somehow worse than Comic Sans! Apparently the eBook version has Comic Sans and a slightly different ending but I don't own the eBooks and scraped these strips from the Internet Archive so you're getting it the same way I did originally and every re-read since: with all the peak 2004 webcomic mistakes intact :unsmigghh:

# ¿ Nov 23, 2023 02:13

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

John Allison posted:

Everything about "Count My Toes" was thrown together in a panic. I was working on another book and this story became the poor relation.

What saved it from being totally without merit was the fact that i could sit in the garden in the sun and write it. So greatly did I enjoy sitting under my inexpensive canopy that most comics had twice as many words as were strictly necessary.

I realise now that this was a bad example to set the young.

Confessions: the title doesn't mean anything (although I pretended that it did). The plot reprised a few popular characters who had to all intents and purposes been put away because I had nothing left for them to do.

In delivering my warmed-over "greatest hits", Scary Go Round became "the comic where Shelley dies, repeatedly". Of course, in this story, she doesn't die. As any fool can see, she just has a series of rather unpleasant and unfortunate accidents.

And in its original form, the comics were lettered in a way that made them hard to read. But who hasn't made a mistake in their life? I bet you, reader, have made a mistake at least once. It happens! To compound insult and injury, I ended the story on a cliffhanger which I had no intention of ever resolving.

So, in the spirit of reconciliation, I've attempted to mend everything that ailed this tale. I've been through every panel mending rushed art, I've drawn new panels to fix cut corners, and I've written an ending that, if not exactly a satisfying pay off, should let people rest easy at night. [editor's note: you do not get this version. we are chuggin' from the internet archive faucet of SGR here.]

And I've even worked on repairing myself. As I nursed (through the late summer months) a drawing hand that had become little more than a withered claw, I made a decision. All comics would now be drawn by telekinesis (or as I dubbed it, "movey-mind").

Scary Go Round (May 10-13, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 24, 2023 01:54

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (May 14-19, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 24, 2023 22:35

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Yeah, it's not good. There's a reason Allison reverted it after this arc.

I could probably go through every single one of the strips with this font and put them back to comic sans but I don't know how long that would take and if it would even properly typeset to the size of the speech bubbles.

# ¿ Nov 25, 2023 06:05

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (May 20-24, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 26, 2023 02:24

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (May 25-28, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 27, 2023 01:40

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (May 31-June 2, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 28, 2023 02:56

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (June 3-8, 2004)

Oh hey, this one's in Comic Sans. Didn't notice that last time I went through these.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2023 02:27

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (June 9-14, 2004)

# ¿ Nov 30, 2023 00:34

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (June 15-18, 2004)

Oh, hey Ralph.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2023 01:11

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 14:58

Kazinsal: Dec 13, 2011

Scary Go Round (June 21-23, 2004)

# ¿ Dec 1, 2023 22:57

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > BSS: Bisexual Super Son > The John Allison-verse: Steeple, Giant Days, Scary Go Round, Bad Machinery

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