Nightmare Fuel / Lackadaisy

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As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Webcomic

• When the Pig Farmers kidnap Rocky, they thrown him in the back of their truck with the carcass of a rabid pig that had to be euthanized.
• The Pig Farmers get a healthy dose of this themselves when Freckle gets his hands on a Tommy gun and begins stalking them, laughing the whole time.
  Avril: Ain't no living thing oughta make a sound like that.
  • Even worse, Freckle almost shoots Rocky along with the pig farmers. Rocky almost has to beg for his life to break through to his cousin.
• In a flashback, Mordecai chases a lawyer that he and the Savoys kidnapped. When he catches up with the escapee, Mordecai sinks a hatchet into the man's leg. The man is terrified and has no idea what he did to deserve the violence. Offscreen, Mordecai dismembers the man with his hatchet. Later, Mordecai and the Savoys leave the man's remains with the Pig Farmers.
• Bobby and Abelard hit Rocky with their hearse, giving him a massive head wound. After Elsa stitches up his wound, he has bloodshot eyes and a scar in the middle of his forehead.
  • There's something very, very off about Rocky after he got hit. His Cheshire Cat Grin seems permanently plastered on his face; pairing it with his heavily dilated pupils and bloodshot eyes, there are points where it looks more like a Slasher Smile.
  • Lackadaisy Doggerel consists of a fairly dark poem about storms and water-wheels. At the bottom of the page is Rocky drawn in silhouette, with his skeleton emphasized. Just to make matters worse, you can clearly see the crack in his skull where the hearse hit him, showing just how bad the injury is... and how far off the deep end it has sent him.
    • It gets even worse as the next page reveals that the whole poem was recited by Rocky himself out loud in the rain, which gets a lot of stares from Ivy and Bobby as they load up the liquor.
• Serafine and the Maitre Carrefour cult become increasingly menacing toward Mordecai during his visit to their fete. The scene culminates with Serafine holding a knife to a frightened Mordecai as Zulie undoes his tie and shirt. Offscreen, Serafine carves a Voodoo symbol into his chest. We next see a groggy Mordecai in the backseat of their car, suggesting that he may have been chloroformed or drugged during the ordeal. There's also blood on his collar visible in the next scene at the pool hall, contributing to a more vulnerable-looking Mordecai as he essentially lets slip to Gracie during the interrogation that he's endured the Savoy's insanity thus far to try and find out about Atlas' death.
  • Lackadaisy Voodooienne also has a ghostly wolflike skull somewhat blended into the background.
• Ivy's nightmare she has after sneaking an injured and almost catatonic Rocky into her school. As for "Heebie-Jeebies", she's still unnerved about it.
• The various Nightmare Faces:
  • Rocky pulls some interesting expressions in this page. Later on, after getting a serious head injury, Rocky appears to be genuinely unbalanced, the revealing shot of his new scar along with bloodshot eyes makes him downright frightening.
  • His cousin takes after him. It's even more terrifying when he's less fuzzy.
  • Mordecai pulls these occasionally, such as over "asymmetry"
  • Abelard when he's on a roll...
  • Viktor has a pretty terrifying face in Ivy's nightmares, in part because his missing eye seems to have turned into a gun barrel and his other eye is milky white.
• In "Lackadaisy Confessional", Mordecai calmly threatens to torture Gracie with a corkscrew wine-bottle opener if he refuses to provide answers to his questions.
  • In the immediate follow-up, the Savoys find where they are and call to Mordecai to let them in. Mordecai immediately goes to hide Gracie, warning him that if he wants to live through the night he needs to give Mordecai the information he wants. In other words, Mordecai has realised that the Savoys are such loose cannons that he can effectively use them for a dangerous Good Cop Bad Cop game with Gracie, who he had been interrogating.

Animated

• The animated pilot really captured Mordecai's icy, detached malice. Of special note are the ticking sounds that accompany most of his scenes and the moment where, as Freckle is trying to save Ivy from Nico and Serafine, Mordecai quietly counts his shots until he runs out, then takes his chance to fire at him.
• This is our first time seeing and hearing Freckle animated. The way he goes from soft-spoken and gentle to roaring with laughter while spraying bullets at people is very unsettling. Bonus points when Ivy asks if he's alright. The feral scowl and deep-throated growl he shoots her only lasts a second, but it clearly leaves her terrified.
• Rocky can be just... off. He’s cheerful and articulate, but it’s amusing and showboating when he’s talking with friends. When we see him laughing like a madman, chucking dynamite at people while crowing about the circus, it’s pretty creepy.

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