Mountain Time 1200: The Mountain Time Hurly Burly 78: Rabbit! Run!
Jun19
Suggested wine pairing: Hairy Buffalo.
When your 1200th episode is also the finale of
THE MOUNTAIN TIME HURLY BURLY,
do you really have any choice but to make it one of your longest episodes ever? Yes, you do. This is ridiculous.
Thanks for reading! Check back Monday; maybe between now and then I’ll remember how to make original-flavor Mountain Time.
(I thought I’d have a nice, long time buffer to get back in the swing of things after the HB, but I finished drawing this one on god damn Saturday.)
Jolly well done. My dipstick affirms that I am now precisely 1200% hurlyburlyed.
That was a hell of a ride. I second the jolly well done, and I’ll definitely be upgrading Mountain Time to “has a character with a catchphrase about not caring how things are dried” when I describe it to other people from now on.
Really, amazing work on all this. It’s pretty hard to canonically kill off nearly every named/moderately-important character, but yet another to do so and *then* continue the story with them alive, but still have it feel narratively coherent.
Anyway: “feels like an eternity” indeed! Originless objects that only exist within a time loop are one thing, but a *sapient* one is entirely another.
Holy shit Bag Lady is Simone!?
This is what I love about Mountain Time. (Warning: unnecessarily long analysis incoming.)
Twists are at their most effective when the audience doesn’t see it coming, but feels like they could have. There’s a certain line that twists cross where they’re so foreshadowed and telegraphed that they become obvious; the thing is the best twists are the ones that come as close as possible to that line without stepping over it (it’s like Price is Right, only with less Drew Carey, unless the twist you’re writing is *really weird*). You want there to be some kind of hint—something the audience can look back on after the twist and go “OOOHHHH” at—but you don’t want that hint to stand out too much the first time around, or else people will notice it, ask questions about it, figure out the answers to those questions, and then oh no, your twist is predictable. Getting your hints to blend into the rest of the work by making them not raise loads of questions is hard and requires lots of skill and practice. But Mountain Time flips all this on its head and instead makes its hints blend into the rest of the work by *making the rest of the work raise just as many questions*. In any other work of fiction, it would have been obvious that something was up with the People Who Breathe Until They Die and their weird relationship with Bag Lady, but in Mountain Time it’s just more random gibberish to add onto the pile. The plot hooks are blatant and yet you don’t notice them because you can’t pick them out from all the other craziness that’s going on. It’s fantastic and there’s no other work of fiction quite like it.
Let’s see what we got here. Honest advertising. Nice attention paid to monocular vision being off-center. Always nice to see a ‘saying a bunch of strange shit’ plot device that works right into the plot. Holy Hargreaves, this was a hell of a ride.
Momentai, being behind schedule and finishing stuff shortly before posting it is an important part of having a comic this long! Trust me.
That reminds me, I need to pay my sodium bill.
Nahtmmm: Careful! If you run over-hurlyburlyed for too long, you’ll blow a gasket.
NAR: That’s the kind of comic description I’ve always aspired to.
Xin: Thanks! With so many elements in the air, I had to be very careful about what I wrote prior to the Hurly Burly. Now I get to relax that sphincter for the first time in what feels like an eternity.
(Speaking of which, I’m glad that line’s meaning was apparent.)
Circle: You just made my fucking day, man.
One thing I have going for me is that my archive is a giant hodge-podge of ideas that are all over the place, and with an ocean of noise big enough, you can hide any message. Which is basically what you said, but without mentioning Drew Carey, because now I’m kind of tempted to test those waters…
Anyway, thanks for getting *exactly* what I was going for. Cheers!
Cold: Would that I could’ve done the monocular vision more consistently throughout, but as this was my first foray into first-person POV, I think it’s pretty good.
Is “Holy Hargreaves” a reference to Canadian midfielder Owen Hargreaves? If so, don’t you think he already gets enough attention on here?
But yeah, for all the nonsense-spewers I have in my cast, at least one is justified.
The Mister Men guy! But maybe that one too. A good webcomic is like a good game of bases ball, I’m told.
OH! I have a couple of those yet today:
http://mountaincomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/mr-men.jpg
but the ones I remember from kidness were Mr. Bump and Mr. Tickle. Never thought about the author’s name.
(Owen Hargreaves was a *soccer* midfielder. Soccer is much more like how I imagine beachball works, and Simone is a midfielder, and I definitely had tunnel vision while working on the HB.)
Obscure H2G2 refrence?
Indeed.