NEW VOTING INCENTIVE! APRIL IS HERE!!
So the last image got all corrupted when I uploaded it, but I’ve got a new one! Nothing can go wrong with the new one, right?
As for this comic…
I will readily admit that I sometimes fall down the ‘sustainable urban living’ YouTube rabbit hole and watch endless videos about how North American cities are ruining our lives with their car-centric natures, their lack of public transportation, their giant parking lots. They’ve got a point. But usually after the twentieth video, I start to develop a creeping sense of dread that their utopian vision is equally as terrifying as the status quo – just in new and different (and decidedly European) ways.
But maybe that’s just me. I can’t help but be a mushy, wimpy centrist at heart and any time anyone on any side of the political spectrum starts talking about radical new ideas (or a radical return to old, defunct ideas), I get scared. It all comes back to fear.
Oh, and it’s not every day I get to reuse art I drew over a decade earlier, but today’s the day! The shots of the TV and cabinet (but not the heads or the images on screen) are pulled from #163. I never redraw a background if I can avoid it.
Edit: I changed Satan’s word bubbles to have white text, just because something with the PNG conversion made the black-on-red text really blurry and hard to see. Still not perfect but it’s something.
FIRST LETS GO I WIN
I have a cookie somewhere around here for ya.
There’s some in that dumpster behind subway.
The one that’s on fire?
Yummy warm dumpster cookies.
wonder how Phoebe’s handling all of this.
She is curiously absent.
Poorly.
It’s so sweet how Miranda just floops over “Auntie Tracee.”
Gotta have some cuteness now and then.
Uh oh. He’s at risk of catching on.
No! Not the new hotness!
I feel that Satan in this mood may be even worse than his ‘evil’ persona. At least he’s still causing fear.
Now. I appreciate that there is the clarification of “sustainable URBAN living”. I find a lot of people talking about anti-car and sustainable living and the like tend to over generalise in their statements. They usually mean “relevant to city living” but their statements make it sound like they’re applying it to everyone.
As someone living in rural Australia, I can say that what’s good for the city is NOT always good for rural areas. Especially when we lack decent public transport.
But at least here they are specifically talking about urban, so it’s all good. Just make sure electric scooters stay off the footpaths!
You’re not wrong. Us Aussies have tended to spread out a fair bit.
Even in urban areas. Penrith to Manly is about 70 to 80 km (depending on which way you go) 45ish miles to the metrically deficient.
For comparison, Toronto Metro is about 6000 sqkm, Sydney is over 12000 sqkm. Metro pop about 6 million to Sydney 5.5 million.
We just cant stand being near each other.
Fear? Hah tis but a scratch.
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
I’m guessing that much of Sydney was developed later than Toronto. Any urban development that took place after the advent of the car tends to be way more sprawling than the older designs. The older the city, the denser the design. I remember reading that Ancient Rome had a population of about one million people in the space of just a square Roman mile.
I’m afraid I have to disagree with development timing as a predominant factor in urban sprawl.
York (later Toronto) established 1793. Trashed by the Yanks in 1812. Re-established as Toronto in 1834. Two fires 1849 and 1904 cleared a lot of the previous growth. Toronto was almost a tabula rasa (I exaggerate for effect ) in the early 1900s.
Sydney Cove founded 1788 by the First Fleet. Parramatta founded 10 months later 30km west of Sydney Cove, why? Agriculture. Sydney Cove would not support the agriculture needed by the isolated colony.
I think Sydney’s sprawl has more to do with it’s topography, colonial real-politic and Australian psychology.
Sydney is in a nice, large basin bisected by the Parramatta River, navigable up to … you guessed it, Parramatta.
The colonial authorities realized that they were at the end of a very long supply line. They couldn’t rely on the crown or their neighbors ( there weren’t any ) to supply them. They had to provide for their own food, lumber, stone and minerals. This instilled a strong sense of independence in the elites.
The other end of the social scale also craved independence. Convicts finishing sentences wanted to get out from under the pressure from above, to have a new start.
So we had a diaspora. Both elites and ex-convicts grabbing as much as they possibly could.
Elites to consolidate their positions and ex-convicts to better and elevate theirs. Could say more about squatter legislation but this is getting too long.
Suffice to say we were spreading out well before the Benz Patent-Motorwagen was even a twinkle in daddy Karl’s eye.
Sorry for the rant.
You, sir, sound like you know what you know what you are talking about. So I defer to you.
Rural living requires a vehicle. No question. The issue in many of the cities around here is the fact that the high concentration of people starts to make cars less useful. The cities devolve into a mess of snarled traffic, but North America is positively allergic to public transportation. That said, a lot of newer cities are built in such a fashion that public transportation can’t save them. They were built for cars.
I, for the record, am part of the problem. I live in an extremely remote suburb of a town adjacent to the city, and I have to drive a good ten minutes just to get to the nearest store. I am the worst of both worlds.
I have long term resentment from the turn of the century forward to favor individual over public transportation. I live in a very rural of Kentucky and commute an hour to work and an hour back home.
When my father and grandparents resided in the same place, there were existing rail lines and passenger trains that connected us to these cities. Maybe the US and Canada are too spread out to make rail lines feasible.
I try to argue that rail lines work well for Europe, but being the smallest continent with many developed cities, rail lines work.
I visit one of my daughters living in Switzerland and she commutes by passenger train to Zurich from a town no larger than my own. I spent a wonderful day traveling from Berlin to Prague. We could have gone almost anywhere. I love that I’ve visited many cities in Europe and have not needed to rent a car.
Teens use this system to get around from their towns to the city with fewer worries from parents about crashed vehicles and lower risks.
But I still feel it would have been worth the costs to maintain, expand, and invest in technological advances for urban, suburban and rural rail lines in the US.
There are certainly areas of North America that are simply too big and too sparsely populated to make public transit a viable option there. But there are also certainly MANY areas of the continent that could benefit greatly from a bolstered public transportation network. It’s a real shame.
I’m so sorry! That sounds awful!
Well, it’s our own fault, I guess.
Sometimes I think that *is* the strategy: annoy people enough so they just give in to whatever. (‘Cause they’re sure not winning by reason and logic.)
Hey, it’s a strategy.
I think it would be interesting to see how downtown would look like if it was all bikes as transportation. Now puck on a bike would be interesting to see.
I don’t want to draw bikes. Bikes are a real pain to draw.
You and Shaenon Garrity. I’ve read many an authorial post in SKIN HORSE about her hatred of drawing bikes.
Note that I don’t draw them. Bikes and motorcycles are a nightmare because their working mechanical bits are exposed. That means you need to draw them, and mechanical bits are easy to get wrong, even when drawing from an actual model image.
I’ve been recently reading through the Cardcaptor Sakura manga with my daughter, and I found it amusing to note that when the artists drew bicycles, they basically just used traced images of bikes, likely taken from magazines, with the characters awkwardly placed on top. It’s a solution.
Some motorbikes have their engines covered, like a Vespa, I can see Puck riding this one becasue I can see ME riding one 🙂
https://www.panzerbaer.de/helper/pix/f_vespa-01.jpg
I could TOTALLY draw a Vespa.
Does that make Coriander a seedy nutjob?
Personally I’m not a fan of the “cars are evil” mantra. Large pickups and SUVs, are evil though.
I’m not a big fan of the vehicular size inflation of the North American car market. I won’t dispute that some people may need pickup trucks, but the fact that the F-150 is the most popular vehicle in the country is just sad. And they don’t buy full-bed trucks! They buy these extended cab mom-mobiles with a bed too small to even fit a bicycle! But whatever. It’s not about practicality; it’s about identity.
The F-150’s and the like are all over the place because for a long time they were the cheapest to lease and buy. If you look at any car dealer’s lot, that’s what makes up about half of the ‘cars’ for sale, the rest are the “they all look the same van-cars with a little spoiler on top of the rear hatch” that are pretty much useless as a car and worse as a van.
We have no use for one and if you’re going to buy a 4-door truck, you may as well buy a real van, at least your groceries stay dry that way.
I am a fan of vans. Those who talk about the practicality of a pickup? Van’s got you beat. And did the A-Team drive a measly pickup truck? I think not. Van all the way.
How Satan got his groove back, I guess. Personally though, I’m cheering for Irresponsible Captain Tylor-Satan.
Is this the groove we want from him, though? Is it?
Eh, Irresponsible Captain Tylor, sure. When it comes to government, to pretty much any enterprise, I think of this interchange from a Star Trek novel- “You can’t run a government on comedy lines!” “You can’t? I thought it was quite common!” (How Much For Just The Planet?, for those who want to know.) Hamilton, like it or not, you may be in for a period of peace, order, and good government, for no other reason than ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’!
Uh oh. His Dark Worship has the “strong mayor powers” now. He’s unstoppable. He can’t even be compelled to wear pants!
(For those of you outside Ontario, the Province recently gave mayors of larger cities the ability to override a council vote, unless council can hit back with a 2/3 veto.)
I though of incorporating a little bit of that real world stuff to it, but I thought it might be a little too ‘inside baseball’.
I’m a massive nerd. I’d be O.K. with it.
Don’t get me started on “Light Rail” in Hamilton.
It’s an unmitigated disaster in Ottawa (trains don’t work in winter, many derailments, the track heaters don’t work, the catenary system ices-up and fails/breaks in winter, the dang TRACKS may have too sharp a radius on curves, the former Mayor might hopefully be up on corruption charges, it only serves those living along the Ottawa River – and doesn’t even really reach either Kanata or Orleans properly, the South line is three years overdue – never mind the spur line to the airport, etc…)
Don’t get me started either. Light rail always gives me ‘monorail’ vibes from that one Simpsons episode. Calgary has what many consider to be the best light rail of any city, and when I saw it, it felt more to me like a fun little amusement ride you could use to fast travel between points you’d otherwise easily walk to. It was so small.
The light rail plan in Hamilton runs east to west. It stops before reaching the major population area in Stoney Creek, and doesn’t get to Dundas or Ancaster in the west. And it TOTALLY ignores the MASSIVE population centre of the mountain. Who is it for? It’s built on this false pretence that the downtown core is the place everyone wants to get to. It is not. But nothing will stop them from throwing money away on this beast.
We’re too small to get buses or ‘light rail’, it’s taxis or nothing.
We’re too rural to make an electric car worth the money since you wouldn’t make it between towns in winter and they can’t make it to the city and back without stopping to charge at least once.
There’s no place to charge them here anyway and we can’t afford to hire an electrician (assuming you can find one) to wire a charger into the house.
Electric cars are for Vancouver or Toronto and are never meant to leave the city.
They might work ok for that but in the real world, where people don’t wear green beards to town council meetings without getting laughed at, they’re worse than useless, they’re dangerous.
Sadly, worlds where green-haired hipsters are taken seriously are very, very real. I wish they weren’t. But I live in one.
I think that hybrid should be the right solution. Running fossil-fuel engine in city definitely should be crime, but getting from one city to other on batteries only is not technologically feasible now – it CAN be done but at too high price.
A big issue with electric cars is ‘range anxiety’ and that makes the manufacturers give these cars HUGE (and very heavy) batteries which in turn make the actual running of the car far less efficient. I think hybrids are a great solution right now.
You know, you have to WORK for the kind of evil we expect from the Mayor. Being braindead doesn’t cut it. So sad.
Do they ALL have long socks on? What, are they trying to start a fashion?
Well, Tracee is now aping the Puck stylistic playbook. So though their socks are not the same, they are in line with the usual Puck style.
So she’s now the hotter version of Puck?
How long until Puck works this out?
Well, we will see.
Miranda’s in on it too.
Funny story. I’m my works IT guy, and basically, they’ll sometimes have me check net traffic of employees for “safety” reasons (*just a tip from an IT guy, always use a vpn if you wanna open anything at work other than like an excel or word file, your company will see everything), and funnily enough, I kept seeing recurring traffic to this website (puck comics) by this one employee for the past few weeks now. In my late night meanderings, I actually looked this up, and have now read a few of ur comics!
Unfortunately, it seems like I might need a bit of time to read through the full puck-i-verse, so c you in a couple years! 🙂
Well hey, that is a unique and curious way to discover a comic: through corporate espionage. I approve of the ends, if not the means.
I get impression that Coriander Cuthbert is based on someone you know.
Not so much a person I know as a category of people I know. I am not a fan.
White socks over knees is definitely hotter.
That is subjective. But you are also probably right.
You only ever hear about the wackjobs talking to city council. No one else is amusing enough.
We could use this planning in my city. First, I better dye my hair. 😉