One last scenery comment: that’s not a half-bad grungy alleyway.
And one last homage to an early influence, this time CLAMP. Patrick’s body being wrapped up and dumped on top of a garbage pile is just Chobits.
(He’s not wrapped up in sexy form-hugging bandages, though. Just a blanket. This is beat-up-woobie fanservice, not sexy-naked-girl fanservice.)
Pseudo-LiveJournal entries here.
Bianca’s icon is Shinji, from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Sparrow of course has Ace, the one from Doctor Who.
Her bureau in the top left panel has the clay pot we’ll later see in her window (made by Sparrow’s mom, then a gift to Bianca from Sparrow), and the ballerina music box that shows up in her bedroom. And a roll of tissue. She’s not on the antidepressants yet, so it gets a workout.
Bianca goes to QPOC because her college’s white-founded LGBT+ groups have racism issues, and her black family has homophobia issues. Both groups keep making progress, but being a minority within a minority is still tough.
At some point I went through the BICP archives and deleted a bunch of really egregious comments, but there was one on this page that still manages to annoy me from beyond the grave. The gist was “Grammy is great! Not because of anything she said, but because I’m projecting onto her a bunch of my political opinions that have nothing to do with what’s on the page. Anyway, I’m totally a pro-gay ally, it’s just a wacky coincidence that I leaped to identify with a character when the sum total of her dialogue was anti-gay ranting.” Urrrrgh.
At last, something I wouldn’t have had to look up references for!
Given that this was originally posted in mid-December…and that my lead time on new pages wasn’t very long, even at this point…and that I regularly fly (or flew, pre-pandemic) home to Maryland to visit my own parents for the holidays…there’s a very high chance I drew this page while literally sitting in the BWI baggage claim.
(I gave myself a cameo in the top left, and the black bag with a cross, as seen in the middle panel, is a cameo from my Hellsing tote bag.)
Hippie bohemian Wiccan lesbian separatist covens FTW.
Young Sharon Applebaum has a medallion with a bird on it. Yes, it’s a sparrow. She’s already interested in their significance in Jewish mysticism, which, as she’ll explain in chapter 8, led to the name choice for Sparrow-her-daughter.
(Don’t worry, Sparrow’s Unnamed Grandmother, your time is coming.)
Hannah is really good at this.
She’s probably been keeping her mind occupied with “if I got the Being, what would be the most effective way to use its powers?” for years now. (Same way we might work through all the possibilities of “if I had 3 genie wishes…” or “if I won a million dollars in the lottery…”)
…come to think of it, maybe Beings have some kind of instinctive orientation towards “humans who have thought a lot about what they want from me” as potential new Masters. It would also line up with how Lily, after losing Brother Alvah, naturally followed Timothy off the cult’s land.
Okay, so this twist is pure Octavia Butler.
Shapeshifters, slavery, people who can’t overthrow the whole abusive power structure but do resist it in cool fantastical ways? That’s just Wild Seed.
It never comes up in the plot at all, even as a throwaway mention…but I intended for Hannah to be a distant ancestor of Bianca’s. That’s why they have the same eye color.
Yeah, still a bit of mood whiplash here.
The accents in this segment were hard. Rewrote the dialogue a couple times, not sure I like the results even now…but I also don’t think I could rewrite them to be any better. So we’re stuck with it.
Nice dress on past!Poe, at least.
(Lydia Ann, Sister Lily, Kara Lynn…I sure do like my “ly” sounds in Being names, huh?)
I also grew up on Calvin & Hobbes, including all the strips with snowmen, winter adventures, and Calvin-Susie bickering.
Granted, baby Bennett here doesn’t exactly have that vibe. But I don’t think I would’ve drawn this scenario at all without that reading material in mind.
In the real world, the first Pokémon video games weren’t released until 1996, so Miranda couldn’t have developed her fandom quite this early.
…but this is a world where Magical Fighting Battle Monsters really exist, so the idea of “let’s put them in a video game” happened earlier. That is absolutely BICP canon. It has been accounted for.
