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History

Click to the actual site to see the French/English alternate.

That, my friends, is perhaps the largest one-day audience a webcomicker has achieved, as Kate Beaton does her thing on the Canadian Google homepage today. Alas, the fact Henrietta Edwards didn’t do her particular brand of equality-fighting “down south” is apparently reason enough to not include her in the Statesian version of the homepage, but that’s okay — we can click through to the maple-scented version, too.

Alternately, you can browse to the permanent Google Doodle site¹ any time you like to see Beaton’s alternate design and read her thoughts about Ms Edwards. And mark my words, it is just a matter of time before Beaton is asked to design a Heritage Minute and I will drive all the way up to Toronto and watch TV all damn day to catch sight of that when they do².

The rest of the post is about cars.

  • There’s something about Something*Positive and cars. For starters, there was the guest strip from David Willis t’other day because Randy Milholland had a family emergency, a strip that may hold the record for longest callback in the history of webcomics.

    For those whose memories don’t stretch back ten friggin’ years, a long time ago there was a strip called Queen of Wands, which wrapped in January of 2005. One of the characters from QoW, Kestrel, had already done crossover appearances in Something*Positive, and when QoW wrapped, creator Aerie essentially gifted her to Milholland, who promptly did this (she got better).

    Important webcomics rule: never give Kris Straub an opening, because mere hours later, he provided another POV on the same scene in Checkerboard Nightmare. Then David Morgan-Mar (PhD, LEGO®©™etc) got in on the act, and I know there were other references in various other locales back them, but hell if I can find them³.

  • But the really cruel part of Something*Positive and cars — the part that makes Kestrel’s hood-dance look downright comfy by comparison — started half a year later, when Fred MacIntire got a letter from his doctor. Not quite a year after Kestrel got by a physical car, Fred got hit by a metaphorical one, and the slow-motion collision that’s been building ever since started with the screeching brakes despite everything that cries out no, no, slow down, stop! nothing is slowing down.

    He’s accelerating towards his fate, so fast that he’s going backwards and it’s heartbreaking. Randy Milholland’s never shied away from the (honest, earned) painful parts of his character’s lives — but Alzheimer’s patients can live a cruelly long time in decline, and I hope that just this once, Milholland has mercy on his character (not to mention us) and finds the happiest possible outcome. On the plus side, it’s been established in the universe of S*P, afterlives are real and it’s been too long since he’s seen Faye. That’s going to be one heck of a reunion.


Spam of the day:

Is this fair to volunteers who are not members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints?

I’m not qualified to answer this one, but you can check with my Evil Twin; he’s LDS.

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¹ Particularly after today when it will rotate off the main page.

² For the record, when they ask me at the border what the purpose of my visit to Canada is and I say To watch TV until I see the new Heritage Minute, it will not be the answer most likely to have gotten me detained by Mounties. That occurred on St Groundhog’s Day, 1991, as part of the particularly bizarre weekend that I met my wife. Let’s just say that Mounties have a better sense of humor than US Customs did.

³ Mostly because that spasm of running over Kestrel predated the start of this blog by ten months and holy glob we at Fleen (which is to say, me at Fleen) have been doing this for nine damn years.

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