Bad Machinery

Bad Machinery is a webcomic by John Allison. It's not his first webcomic—before it, he did Scary Go Round (now finished), and before that he did Bobbins (also finished)—so Allison is basically a webcomic veteran by this point.

John A's writing and dialogue alternates between aggressively quirky and aggressively British. I remember making an honest-to-goodness attempt to get into Scary-Go-Round, only to find the whole thing impenetrable and off-putting—yet somehow the same style, applied to a younger cast, makes Bad Machinery charming and engrossing. Go figure.

What's that? You want to know what it's about? It's about six kids—three girls, three boys—in a British secondary school. They get into the usual shenanigans for kids of their age, and they investigate mysteries. And since they live in Tackleford (which is apparently located on Planet Eris), the solutions to these mysteries often involve curse-monsters, space aliens, and bridge trolls.

Here is the home page. Here is the trope article.

Anyway, I wrote all that so I could write this: Ellen Selkie is so freaking adorable, it hurts.

edited 23rd Mar '12 11:39:56 PM by MetaFour

I find Bad Machinery delightful. Nonsensical, but delightful. And yes, Selkie is adorable.

Bad machinery has one of the highest "Joke per comic" ratios I've ever seen.

Also, "Nonsensical, but delightful"; I couldn't have said it better.

If I had to describe it...I would say it would be what Gunnerkrigg Court would be like if every strip were written City Face style.

Edit: And while I'm at it, might as well link what would happen if Siddell did draw it.

edited 24th Mar '12 1:24:50 PM by TotemicHero

New page. If this is how Lee deals with relationship problems, then Mildred's probably doing the smart thing by not going any further with him.

Man, why didn't I get around to reading this sooner? I'm only a few chapters in, but it is super excellent.

Bad Machinery is BACK.

Finally!

And yes, some of those fields only lead to careers in teaching that field.

New page.

Who needs the drama club? There's plenty of drama right here.

They have only themselves to blame for not joining drama club.

It's hard to do a post for every update, since there usually isn't much to say besides "The dialogue is still fantastic".

I just finished bingeing (sp?) this over the last two days.

It's pretty great.

Latest page is the greatest of fakeouts.

Huge Manga hair.

Has anyone been watching Educating Yorkshire? I was delighted to discover that the big-hair thing is utterly Truth in Television.

And the current time-travel-based storyline just keeps getting wilder and wilder...

Time travel tends to do that

Late, but have some Halloween costumes.

Who's Lottie supposed to be?

Zatanna, I believe.

I've read all of John Allison's comics. At least the ones readily available on the site, so... Bobbins, Scary Go Round, Giant Days, Bad Machinery, and the other little Shelley one-shots. I'm liking this new story so far, if only for the little callbacks to Bobbins, but I'm sad that the boys aren't getting more screentime. Especially Sonny, since he was in France while the last mystery was going on.

On that note...

What can we do to catalogue the various comics in what I shall tentatively call the Tackleverse? At the moment, Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery have their own pages, but Bobbins, Giant Days, and various one-shot stories have nowhere official to go. Now just to confuse things we're getting modern-day stories about Amy, Ryan and Shelly under the title Bobbins NOW interspersed with Bad Machinery.

By way of comparison, a webcomic 'verse with a similar situation has one page for Walkyverse and another combined one for Roomies, It's Walky, and Joyce & Walky.

I'd suggest we create a page for the Tackleverse and any comic with its own page can just have a link there, while others with fewer examples can be listed on that page until there's enough to split them off. This'd also allow us to explain simply in one place how each comic relates to the others in chronology and character focus.

edited 14th Dec '13 4:10:16 AM by johnnye

That would be a good idea.

The trope pages for Evan Dahm's webcomics are set up similarly, with a page for the whole 'verse at Overside, and individual pages for the longer webcomics.

Is there an existing Fan Speak term for the wider 'verse?

This page says "Bobbinsverse", but I can't find any results for that term anywhere else. Alternative ideas: Tackleverse, Allisonverse, Scaryverse.

I'd appreciate the help of anyone who's more familiar than me with SGR, I haven't quite steeled myself for the 7-year Archive Binge yet.

edited 14th Dec '13 1:32:49 PM by johnnye

I'd be tempted to just name the page Tackleford.