New Weekly Voting Incentive: PUCKIANS OF THE GALAXY!!!
In the spirit of Halloween, the Puck gang are celebrating the second most entertaining movie of all time (almost beat the Blues Brothers for my number one spot!) in crazy cosplay fashion! The first one’s already gone by, so don’t miss this week’s!
CLICK HERE TO VOTE FOR PUCK! A VOTE FOR PUCK IS A VOTE NOT FOR GARY BUSEY!
ALSO…
PUCK WAS IN A NEWSPAPER!!! FOR, like, ONE DAY!
On Friday of last week, the Hamilton Spectator (my local daily) ran a profile on Puck. What’s more, the article was written by the fabulous Jeff Mahoney, a humour and human interest writer that I’ve been a big fan of for decades. There’s nothing like getting praise from a writer whom you’ve long admired. You can check it out HERE!
ALSO ALSO…
As for this comic…
This is (thankfully) the last time I will have to draw Phoebe in this outfit. It was a cute concept, but it’s had its day. In fact, its day came and went over a month ago.
This comic wasn’t entirely necessary in the story arc, but I thought a major plot hole like this needed to be dealt with. Where will Daphne and Phoebe stay? Now you know.
Phoebe just isn’t the type to rough it. And I don’t blame her.
And hey, 256 comics! That’s a big thing in binary!
Phoebe must make a LOT in tips from Howlers if she can afford a 4 star hotel.
She IS the daughter of Satan.
Pretty sure she’s rich, as is…
I believe the figure given earlier was a grand in tips a night at times. Oh, and Ontario doesn’t have that goofy ‘waitresses get paid one dollar an hour because, you know, tips’ law, so there’s a pay cheque above and beyond that.
Also, didn’t she say in the beginning of the new stretch (post-coma Puck) that she got into the stock market and made a killing?
That’s how she bought the house (or gave a loan to Puck).
See? Now I’M the geek who remembers stuff from way back.
Of course, to me, that was last week. To you guys it was year(s).
She said she started loaning money out. Not sure what it means, though.
Is Guido her collection agent?
Nah, I think she’s too nice for that. She leaves the mob connections to her dad.
She makes enough to have bought Puck a house.
(Well… loaned her the money to buy one, at least).
Granted, Evil Daddy likely HAS given her a credit card for emergencies… but she makes enough bank on her own there’s no need for her to use it for this.
Cue some form of Beyoncé song.
At first, I thought “horns and a tail; she’s gonna make great tips! “.
Then I realized she might have daddy’s credit cards. What do you think Satan’s credit line may be?
P.S. Goodbye to the Phoebe Sleeves? Did we ever get the name of that style?
In the great scheme of making things up as you go along, I thought of it as Wholely Unholy Holey style.
She makes great tips … AND likely has daddy’s credit card. She is not hurting for cash, certainly.
And the style, I believe, is called ‘trashy modern’.
Satan’s credit?
It would not suprise me in the least to learn he’s a significant shareholder in several banks… enough to dictate their product policy.
Satan: “Let’s promote a product where people save for their futures by loaning their hard-earned money to the bank, at a very generous (to the bank) interest rate like 1.5%, and is that’s always less than inflation, so they’re losing value every single year they keep the money in it. Let’s tell them it’s *guaranteed* and *most secure*! We can call them ‘Guaranteed Investment Certificates (GICs)! (Certificates of Investment (CIs) in the USA)’! Because they’re ‘guaranteed’ to lose money every year! BWAHAHAHA!”
Satan’s minon: “Delightfully cruel to all Americans who honestly thought they’d never need math after high school, Sire! What will you do to top that?”
Satan: “Oh, I’m going loan them their OWN money back on credit cards for 15 TIMES as much interest as when they loaned the same money to me!”
Minion: “… Surely not even poor people are that gullible?”
Satan: “I’ll bet you a coke none of them ever figure out the connection between the two separate products! I’ll shaft them both ways and they’ll thank me for it twice! MWahahaha!”
(Spoiler alert: Satan got himself a free coke).
This is startlingly accurate. To both the dynamics of Satan and the dynamics of the banking industry.
I probably haven’t mentioned, but I used to be a financial advisor, helping families extricate themselves from the large-scale scams of major financial institutions like life insurance companies and banks, so I can probably debunk most “services” you’ve been marketed to with at length (but somehow that puts people to sleep unless it’s their OWN money they’re losing).
Ultimately, I was not very successful in that business; not because I didn’t know what I was talking about, but most people are very on-guard for a strange guy they never met walking up and promising them simple ways to get out of debt, save up millions for their retirement, offer safe and lucrative investments for their money that will actually have them with several million to retire on, or sell them PROPER life insurance (I needed to hold a license to deal in that so I could replace the scam life insurance with the proper stuff, kind of like you need a real contractor to fix the damage the crappy one did to your house)
… but they are much LESS on-guard against large, established institutions with their names on the top of skyscrapers in every major city.
*I’m* shady???? Whose money do you think they used to build all those skyscrapers? Yours! Those buildings are monuments to a track record of exploitation dating back 100 years or more!
(sigh)…Anyway… I eventually found another career helping people who are more receptive to being helped, albeit in more direct, immediately apparent ways.
Barber?
Honestly, my dad could have really used your previous services.
It no longer surprises me (but does depress me) to hear of how horribly predatory large organizations can be on the poor and downtrodden. Pretty terrible. Glad to hear you fought the good fight.
@ Frank
Personal Support Worker. I help old men in wheelchairs get their pants on in the morning. 😛
Has the advantage that I’m almost never in an argument about whether or not they need my help. 😛
So yeah, I’m out of the financial advisor business; I let my professional licenses lapse without renewing them. I was not getting enough new clients to make a living at it, but I gave it a good go part-time for almost a decade. Helped a few people here and there, when they’d let me. Still got treated like a shifty used car salesman half the time.
Most heartbreaking was a lady I thought of as a friend for whom I’d set up a healthy retirement savings and investment plan, but she fell into this weird combination Ponzi/Pyramid scheme (that operates mainly in North America, but keeps its headquarters in Australia… because those kind schemes are illegal here… that’s a big red flag). She made me pull all her money out of her very solid retirement investments to “buy a license” to sell more of their “training programs” at ever-escalating price scales.
I think by that point she’d sunk so much money and time into it, that believing me when I explained what a scam it was (and possible to land her in jail, even; as I said, they’re illegal here) had become impossible for her. She’d just committed too deep. I lost touch with her; I hope she’s okay.
And here I was, the cynic, thinking you’d gone into the business of ‘helping’ people by breaking knee caps or at the very least bartending,
Hats off to you, good sir. Personal support workers have, I believe, a special place in heaven reserved for them.
I got distracted.
If you DO need some sound financial advice, getting out of debt, saving for retirement or kids’ education, or just want to know if you’ve got proper life insurance or if you’ve been fast-talked into paying a lot every month to get a very little, the company I worked for was called Primerica Financial Services. They were founded in the 1970s by a bunch of people furious at how the deeply crooked life insurance industry had ripped off their relatives and/or themselves, and in a beautifully capitalist solution, made their own company and tried to run the shady crooks right out of business, by the simple method of being honest with people instead of trying to scam them (and uh, explaining in plain, lay-person language, how the shady companies have successfully scammed them. That’s pretty effective also).
It’s a company built on the premise that you can not only make a profit, but thrive, helping 10 families succeed themselves rather than rip of one family for every penny they have. It works quite well… presuming you can convince people to sit down with you for an hour and talk seriously about their finances. I was never great at that convincing part.
So I can’t help you, or your dad, with anything more than generic advice that (in a webcomic comment section no less) is not demonstrably more credible than than hearsay, but PFS can surely help you.
(Also, they don’t charge people to talk to them, so you’ve really nothing to lose.)
Sorry – you count from 0 to 255 in computer logic, hence the previous comic No 255, FF (hex) or 1111 1111 bin, was the big one… and that’s only a hardware limitation due to 8 bit computers and IP version 4 addresses…
Now what downtown hotel in what downtown mall is this? It looks familiar… 😛
You know what? I was adding up the numbers in binary to test it out before putting the strip out, and figured that out. And it ruined the joke, but I went for it anyway. If you include the zero, then hey, it still counts.
Yeah, I think that Phoebe would only stay at the Sheraton. Anything less would cramp her style.
I’m Tempted to say “Jerry Springer”, but that’s going the wrong direction
oops, this was supposed to be 2 strings down… sorry….
I know. I will go “127.0.0.1” now…
But it also strikes me that Phoebe is the type of person not to bother with opening the notice that tells someone that the Connnaught has been gutted to turn into condos, so it would have been funny to see her walk into a construction site thinking it was a 4 star hotel…
True. Mind you, it’s been SO long since the Connaught was a decent hotel that I think it predates Phoebe’s memory.
Hers are the only streets located on the penthouse level.
The streets are better up here!
And I’m sure they have way better coffee shops too.
Oooh, wicked…. a baby shower in a 4 star hotel, where the WHOLE WORLD will see….
Pheobe, you my not be the mad genius that Daphne is, or the vindictive ball of hate that Puck is, but sometimes innocence springs forth serendipity!!
Not sure whether the shower itself will occur at the hotel. Hotel showers sound decidedly unclassy. And this shower needs to be classy. Above all else.
Satan getting kicked out of his mansion (referring to alt-text)? Great, now I have to see THAT…
As for this comic, I was actually curious what you were gonna do with them after they couldn’t get back home.
I was thinking they’d crash some other place and… Let’s face it, a hotel IS kinda “some other place”.
The Ritz-Carlton Hotel for Transients.
Rich transients are their own unique breed. They rely upon room service for their everyday survival.
As proven in the movie “Spaceballs”…. 😛
Ooh, the Ritz-Carlton is my favorite hotel in Boston. I would go to a shower there, especially in the bar. I love that bar. Spencer drank there, in the books.
Yeah, I don’t think we have a hotel (or bar) of that caliber in this area.
“Spenser, with an ‘S’. Like the poet.”
As I’ve said many times, your backgrounds are so detailed, clean and textured. Beautiful work, man!
As a fellow artist, I can appreciate little things like that. I’m sure others here do as well. 🙂
That’s funny, because I tend to plan my backgrounds so that they require the LEAST amount of work from me. Case in point: panels one, two and three reuse the same background. Panel four is a fresh draw, but a no-point perspective one at that. I’m glad my ridiculous corner-cutting isn’t too evident.
Let me add my kudos for the fourth panel. I love it
Thanks. If I can communicate the basics of what I need to get across, I’m happy.
Have you opened up a newspaper lately and seen just how simplistic many comic strips done in the manner you do your’s are nowadays? Terrible and lazy art.
Sometimes, we do what we must to meet our deadline but most can see the extra effort put into certain ones even if so.
Don’t sell yourself short, man. This truly is great work for light-hearted fare. Press on. 😉
Hey, if I can be truly great light-hearted fare, that’s all I ask.
An awesome vote comic for Puck would be Doom Patrol Puck and company.
HAIL SATAN for an endless supply of money thanks to the evil (though not truly malicious) spirits of Greed.
SOrry just had to make that joke.
Well, you can’t be blamed for making mandatory jokes.
Congrats on the 256 by the way. A comic a day for a year. Actually no mean feat to get to.
Uh, what kind of year you smoking? Last time I counted, there were 365. But there ARE 256 colors in a DOS VGA color palette! And that’s something!
Apparently I’m smoking something. 😀 Disregard my massive blunder. I must have been thinking of a kill screen in a video game for some blamed reason. But still congrats on making it to 256.
One every weekday for a year with five holidays off.
(You’re welcome for the save.)
Satan is used to being kicked out after all he got kicked out of Heaven for trying to overthrow God.
How about putting Puck and company in the Twilight Zone.
Greg, you have so many good ideas. You need to get your own strip so that you can use them.
Not to nit-pick, but doesn’t Phoebe live, happily, in Crackistan?
Very true. But she can construct an oasis of muslin and luxury within her own room, and I think that’s enough.
The Hamilton Spectator article was a great read !
It was a fun bit of press.
And the Variegated Marble in Panel #4 – Magnificent !!
A vector scan of the real thing. It’s my secret weapon sometimes.
(I wanted to say eye tal yun Marble – but the automatic censor spit it back at me. Must be a bad word…. but which one ?)
It’s probably because at one point or another, my site was bombarded with ads for Eye-talian marble or something. I dunno. My spam filter is hand-crafted, so it’s got flaws.