Bandit Axemas Anno 7
I’ll let you sort out the moral for yourselves. (Bandit’s story-within-the-story is not quite done, but you can probably see where it’s going.)
For me personally, this story has an extra layer of uncomfortable irony. As I discussed in my memoir Shortbox, shortly after I finished writing the story and just after this page went live, I ended up ruining (or at least severely compromising) the Christmas experience for my roommate (though my goddaughter got to enjoy it, at least). I thought she’d wanted to sleep in, given her exhaustion: I should have remembered what Rachel said in the first few panels of this very story. It was a misunderstanding, and it’s more than seven years behind us now, but it still hurts to think about that one.
Phil and I had a little disagreement about end rhymes that were solidly in the middle of phrases, like “such” in panel 2 and “join” in panel 4. I stuck to my guns on that one; I think they add to the whimsical tone, which we had to maintain throughout even as the meaning got sadder.
The end of Pinch’s bit here sounds like a premonition of the rise of porch piracy
No way to win, here. If those gifts had “gone boom,” they’d probably have blamed Street-Washer for that, too.
Wouldn’t it just of taken one curios gnome to pick up one soggy broken clock, take a peek under the hood, and realize they weren’t clocks at all?
Wouldn’t a smart gnome type be able to just look at the devices with the gunpowder in them and recognize them as bombs…?
It’s a little hard to swallow that no one noticed that these clocks were filled with explosives.
One possible explanation that occurs to me is: Maybe they weren’t. Maybe Gree deliberately made sure Street-Washer saw him acting suspicious to manipulate her into doing exactly what she did, and if she’d just stayed out of it, the only result would have been that the next morning a lot of people would have been going, “Huh, why is one of my gifts a broken clock?”
(Probably not, since this is never hinted at anywhere in the comic, but it is odd that a teenage former carrier, street-washer, and thief was apparently the only one who recognized clock-bombs.)
That did not occur to me on the first read, but Bandit was pretty solidly outmaneuvered whatever the case might have been: were they actual (broken) clocks, Gree would have claimed Bandit had broken them, and people would have been inclined to believe him over her.
They already made up their minds about Bandit at that point. That town seems to make snap judgements easily considering our first introduction to Gnome Town was a angry mob.