scarygoround

Bad Machinery: The Big Hiatus

Added 2022-09-22 17:05:05 +0000 UTC

As Bad Machinery went on, and I was working on it in tandem with writing Giant Days, I started to struggle to write two "cases" a year, so I began to alternate them with lighter, easier to put together material. In 2016, between cases 9 and 10 I did a story called the Big Hiatus, where I tried to work exclusively in the Japanese yonkoma format. It's a format built for formulaic gag strips but I pushed it as hard as I could to be more visually sophisticated, as I thought there was something in the vertical format - I had experimented with it in Robert Cop and Bobbins.horse first. The results were mixed - this is an improvised story with no pre-plotting, and I can really smell the difference at this point, but like a lot of experiments that I didn't feel worked, looking back after six years, it has some exciting energy - a bridge to things I did later, and some roads I never went down again. I pulled the "camera" back a lot to cram as much into each panel as possible.

It's not collected with the other Bad Machinery stories on GoComics, so I've stuck it as a PDF at the bottom of this post. I should have a couple more PDFs from my lost "back pages" over the next few weeks.