End of an Era - Bad Machinery

Once upon a time there was a comic named Bobbins, which followed the adventures of a group of friends working at a local listings magazine in the West Yorkshire city of Tackleford. It was… 

End of an era, take 1.

Okay, honestly, it was probably a miracle of the internet that Bobbins got off the ground and a testament to writer-illustrator John Allison's perseverance that it made it through the difficult early period when the illustrator part of his job title was more a function of necessity than of ability. Like many webcomics it took a while for the strip to get its art style in hand, and Allison has bounced back and forth between hand drawn, computer drawn and something inbetween pretty much ever since, with Bad Machinery perhaps his first comic to adopt a consistent style from beginning to end. 

Bobbins ran from late 1998 to early 2002. Leading character Holly West vanished in the Himalayas and returned an unrepentant bitch queen to run the City Limits magazine into the ground. The magazine folded, the cast were laid off and they stepped aside to allow minor characters Tessa Davies and Rachel Montford-Dukakis, journalism students on a course run by former City Limits editor Len Pickering, to shine in their own spin off, Scary Go Round from June 2002.

You could be forgiven for expecting
the comic to be about these characters.

By October, however, Tessa and Rachel were sharing the limelight with Bobbins veterans Shelley Winters, Amy Chilton and Tim Jones. Admittedly, Shelley was dead and revived as a zombie, but you can't keep a good ginger down and she was soon sporting a sassy new pulse; and not the only member of the cast to whom this would happen. Tessa and Rachel disappeared for a while, returning as worshippers of a satanic figure until one of them went mad with power and the other allowed the cult they had formed to burn her in a wicker vole or something. Reminiscing about Scary Go Round is like what I imagine remembering a drug-fuelled wilderness period might be like; you're never entirely sure what really happened. Bobbins-born slacker Ryan died and came back, Amy and Shelley travelled back in time via teapot and gazumped Lennon and McCartney's songwriting credits, and supersexy, semi-competent superspy Fallon Young was definitely there, battling international crime with a sassy look and a Chinese burn.

End of an era, take 2.

We met younger characters via Shelley's sister Erin, including Dark Esther – later the star of Allison's actually published as a comic comic Giant Days – and the Boy (son of the Mother and the Father, despite 'the Boy' being confirmed as a nickname; apparently the Family is hella supportive.) Thanks to Jekyll and Hyde potions and an attempt to sell a difficult class to the devil to help pad the school coffee budget (I was teaching at the time; I'm not sure sticking the 'what goes on teacher training day stays on teacher training day' comic up in the staff room went down so well,) Erin sort of ended up as the Queen of Hell. An exchange trip went perilous when the Boy thwarted an attempt by a Wendigo to terrorise France in the guise of an Easter Bunny with the help of the briefly-retired Easter Bell (you see what I mean, right?)

The even younger characters Shauna Wickle and Lottie de Groote featured in a late comic. They were girl detectives, but were pipped to the post in solving a school mystery by boy detectives Linton, Sonny and Jack, despite the boys not appearing in most of the story. Scary Go Round wrapped in September 2009 and new comic Bad Machinery took up the mantle ten days later, following the feud of these intrepid young mystery solvers as they navigated the perils of big school (with some indirect assistance from reformed slacker-turned-inspirational teacher Ryan Beckwith.)

Again, you could be forgiven to thinking that Jack was going
to be the lead.

And now, in April 2017, Bad Machinery has finally wrapped. There were mystery beasts and giant flying walnuts; occult shenanigans and human douchebaggery; love and rivalry; mods and rockers; an inner city grammar school with at least two Selkies in simultaneous attendance; and an attempt to get banned from every municipal swimming pool in the UK by performing all of the prohibited acts on the pool safety poster in a single swimming session. The comic has been brightening my weekdays for more than seven years – with intermittent breaks for Scary Go Round and Bobbins revivals, the original Giant Days strips, and the story of how Erin came back from Hell at least twice and the Boy (now going by his actual name, Eustace) joined Tackleford's exclusive club for those who have actually died and come back by one means or another – but the adventures of the Mystery Solvers are over.

Well, that is to say that they will no longer be front and centre. In 2002 we thought we were losing Shelley and co. and they couldn't stay away for six months. Against pretty much all expectation, Ryan turned out to have trained as a teacher and was in Bad Machinery almost from the off, and even more unexpectedly, Amy turned out to have married him, and later gave Shauna a job. Erin Winters returned from Hell the first time before Bad Machinery kicked off and has been a thorn in the Mystery Girls' side (and source of befuddled admiration for the Mystery Boys) since.

What this means for the future is that I would be most surprised if this is the last we ever heard of Shauna and Lottie, or Mildred, or the Mystery Boys, or Little Claire never turned up again as we march forward into a bold new era of All-New Scary Go Round.

End of an era.