March 20th, 2015
19 Mar 2015 · page 475 of 1306
Well, he IS Florrie's twin.
Cast: Ann Barber, Catherine Barber, Edmund Barber, Harriet Barber, June Barber, Sidney Malik
Comments (63)
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omgggg Harry with kids…. panel 6 is melting my heart
That beard is GLORIOUS
ALL CAPS
It's like Civil War general epic.
"...wearing what was probably the most artistic and awe-inspiring set of whiskers in all that bewhiskered Army." describing the man sideburns are named for has amused me since I read it.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose_Burnside "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose_Burnside")
Lackluster general. Artisinal barber. Ladies and gentleman, General George Burnside!
GLORIOUS!
I see Annie is missing a front tooth. Did she just try pouncing on Auntie Nicola?
STEALTHY MCBEARDTWIN
I like him already.
Oh Harry, that little gap-tooth girl has blown your grumpy cover.
I was disappointed that Harry's pipe has disappeared -- until I realized that Harry expected to be tackled by kids and a kid-brother. I would tuck my pipe away, as well!
It didn't disappear. Harry put out her pipe before she got into the carriage.
[http://www.widdershinscomic...](http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/march-10th-2015/ "http://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/march-10th-2015/")
I predict that Harry is gonna be experiencing "Too Much Love!" pretty soon . . .
I love your characters.
Daddy knows his game XD
Annie is absolutely precious. That's all I need to say.
Kate, I thought you said Florrie would be the last relative you introduced with such exact fashion.
Sister, I said :)
Point.
Some point, at.
Actually you just now introduced two sisters, one of which tackle hugged Harry. I call shenanigans.
This pedant here raises you an "At some point...." ;P That point may be DECADES away yet....
[technicality]Two sisters, who are not Harry's sisters.[/technicality]
We like shenanigans!
Nieces have their own rules. xD And, can get away with most things if they puppy dog hard enough. ;)
"Auntie Harry" is clearly Annie's favorite and vice versa. This reminds me so much of interactions in my extended family. And I agree with Idunyken -- the Beard is glorious.
Oh my goodness, her nieces are gorgeous!
Great design on the kids, esspecially that big gap-toothed grin in the second to last panel.
It's also a slightly depressing observation on main-stream comics that you've managed to convincingly set something in pre-Victorian England and yet still make it (apparently effortlessly) more diverse than what most major companies turn out.
Thanks, it's something I try for. Hard to see the hugely diverse crowd at a comic con and not want to include as many people as you can!
Seconded. I'm a little sad that Marvel and DC don't appear to feel the same way- But then again if they did webcomics like yours might not be grabbing increasingly large chunks of the market. Your patreon alone is the equivalent of what? 150+ DC/Marvel comics a month and rising? That makes me happy.
Ahh, it's much easier for me to make a change than it is for a whole company. They're making small steps, at least- I just picked up the first Ms Marvel trade and it's pretty nice!
Indie and webcomics are such a different beast, though, and that is okay by me.
Good point. I guess I get the impression they're afraid to make changes most of the time?
I understand it's different for Indie companies and smaller set ups like webcomics but when so much of that seems (to me anyway) of much higher quality both story and artwise than what comes from major companies..... I guess I just wish you guys got a bigger share of the pie. I'd like to be able to see Widdershins books in my local comic shop. And I know that 10-15 years ago I probably wouldn't have had the variety of Indie comics in there now. shrugs Dunno where I'm going with that exactly, possibly just that I'd like to be able to support my local (independant) comic shop and my favourite independant comic creators at the same time.
A lot of the major characters have licensing deals that make it virtually impossible to change them in a significant manner.
True. And I don't think it is necessarily a good idea to try and suddenly make Clark Kent or Steve Rogers different races/genders/sexualities. However, someone like the Flash is a legacy character. There were I think five characters called the Flash and it passed gradually from one hero to his sidekick (a format I really liked). There hasn't been a female Flash to date and when the New 52 decided Wally West should be black they also re-wrote his personality to make him a jerk. I can't remember any non-white characters appearing in Fables or more recently in what I've read of Unwritten. It's only my take, but from what I see I don't think they like introducing new characters that are 'different' even in completely new stories.
I know it's off-topic, but "There hasn't been a female Flash to date" is not precisely true...
[http://www.hyperborea.org/f...](http://www.hyperborea.org/flash/msflash.html "http://www.hyperborea.org/flash/msflash.html")
[http://www.hyperborea.org/f...](http://www.hyperborea.org/flash/christina.html "http://www.hyperborea.org/flash/christina.html")
[http://www.hyperborea.org/f...](http://www.hyperborea.org/flash/jesse.html "http://www.hyperborea.org/flash/jesse.html")
and for not-"Flash" female members of the Flash family:
[http://www.hyperborea.org/f...](http://www.hyperborea.org/flash/ladies.html "http://www.hyperborea.org/flash/ladies.html")
Now, granted, these each had very short tenures as Flashes. Christina was insane, Patty Spivot's turn was only a dream Barry had, and Jesse Quick had her own legacy to live up to. Yes, an actual female Flash to take a turn at the helm would be great.
Fables did have Mowgli and Aladdin as major characters for some time, but that's two out of a cast of hundreds...
Yes, I agree with the point of the thread - more gender and racial diversification is needed greatly.
Huh didn't know that, thank you for the links. Jesse Quick I knew about (and like from what I've seen of her) but I didn't really think to count her as a 'Flash'. As you say the other two arn't exactly positive examples, essepcially since for Patty that dream seems very much like a 'but if it had been a girl everything would have gone horribly wrong!'
I sort of played a game with myself over this recently. I wrote out cast lists from some of my favourite comics/shows and then looked up statistics for the places they were set, race, religion, disability, that kind of thing. Surprisingly few stories actually show that women are 50% of humanity, and nothing I've seen to date lines up with the fact that 15-20% of people are classed as disabled. I think Locke and Key came out 'best' of the recent ones.
A couple of the changes DC or Marvel made for "diversity" seem to me to be bad ones - mainly DC killing off the original Blue Beetle to replace him with a Hispanic character - but i applaud Marvel's work with the new Ms Marvel.
I've never read Blue Beetle or Ms Marvel I'm afraid. And I agree that some of their changes for diversity seem forced or to miss the point.
I see a tendency in comics (and actually a fair bit of pop culture generally) to count including one white woman and one black man as having ticked some kind of diversity box. To me that seems to be missing the point. And it also seems to give a half complete picture of the world the story takes place in.
Widdershins shows a fantastic variety of characters, not just in terms of skin colour, identity and so forth but their views and backgrounds and personalities. It gives me the impression of a much larger and more complete world.
Tbf that hispanic blue beetle was one of the best runs in a comic book I've read in a long time.
Might well have been - i wasn't in a comic-buying phase (or where i could easily get to a comic store).
It just annoyed me how casually they wiped out a character i'd liked since the Charlton/Ditko days.
And that's the biggest difficulty with trying to introduce diversity to a decades-long established universe--the readership is already attached to the established characters, so killing them off to eventually introduce a replacement is always a tricky business. (Especially when the victim is someone like Ted Kord, whose partnership with Booster Gold was one of the best things in modern comics and had a ton of potential to be more.) And when that replacement is a minority, it automatically sets off warning signs to that readership that you didn't do for story or character reasons, even if you did. That, in turn, gets the new runs off on the wrong foot.
Better to actually create new characters while phasing out some older ones spinning their wheels, take established minority minor characters and build them up (Luke Cage was a successful example of that), or use characters who have a long history of changing out people (Green Lantern, even though Kyle Rayner was another good character lost).
And people who liked the blue beetle before Ted were probably whining much like you are about DC wiping him out to pander to batman fans who wanted another no power gadget hero.
I mean, of all characters to complain about being killed off for a new character, Ted Blue Beetle is a silly one since that's how he got his job in the first place.
Being unhappy a character died is one thing, claiming it's a change made just for the sake of diversity and acting as if it's not the exact same way the character you like cropped up in the first place just makes you seem whiny. Ted wasn't "The Original Blue Beetle" He was just the one you liked.
Actually, it wasn't DC that killed off the previous Blue Beetle - it was Charlton, where he was Steve Ditko's baby.
Ted Kord is the "original Blue Beetle" in that he was created on the ashes of a previous character who was revived pretty much to be killed off for the Ted Kord Beetle's creation - i read those titles when they were published.
I should have said the "good" or "readable" Blue Beetle, i guess.
Dc killed Dan Garret?! Or do you mean Ted Kord, who isn't the original blue beetle, and took over the title, and starting the trend of blue beetle being a legacy title.
I'm also enjoying this aspect. Fantasy settings based on Britain in imperial times tend to either gloss over all the racism, misogyny, opression and snobbery that was rife then, or to delve into it for grim and gritty drama. Widdershins goes out of its way to show how the world could have been better, if that makes sense.
It really does make sense.
I can tell the shorter one takes after her father in the being fun department.
And he's in the culinary arts, too. Well that just about settles it.
He's in the culinary arts, beyond having a farm? Do you know something I've forgotten?
Nevermind. I misread.
. I have a new favorite character he has a beard.
Aaaah...you owe us bios on the new family members on stage... :D
Ladies and gentlemen (as well as people of other gender identities) behold the elusive male of the Barber lineage.
Also, I can't find the confirmation for this but Florie was the youngest sister, right? Meaning this guy grew up with all the older sisters around. I would also point out that while the older girl may be all "daaaaad" she still tried to ambush Harry along with the little one, she only realised they were spotted.
Yes, that was my point, they are twins and I seem to remember she's the youngest sister, which makes him the little brother.
She's a teenager. Eye-rolling is the party.
Edmund's is very strong as well. Look that at that grip. And Sidney's theft aura still hasn't died down either. Still wondering if will ever be dealt with.
I _LOVE_</b.>
Blegh. I meant to write I love the look of Edmund Barber, but something funky happened. ^^;
HTML can be a bi…*notices Gren's disapproving look* … uh … a beast.
They're TWINS!?
This gets better and better. <3
Funny! Love it. Reminds me of the past with my nieces. Even my younger brother is such a clown, very funny friendly 'baby' bro.
That beard, it's terrifying.
... Is there a word for beard-phobia? Because I probably have it.
I have now learned the word for this!
pogophobia
I have it. Beards are hairy and get everywhere and are gross. Convince me elsewise.
Hogwash. Well, hairy I'll admit, but gross? They're softer than stubble, require less maintenance, and keep soup and barbeque sauce and salad dressing and ... off my shirt, providing leftovers for later!