Grrl Power #884 – Wham, Smash, to the Scaffolding

Today is just not going according to anyone's plans it seems.

I'm pretty sure panel 1 is the best boot I've ever drawn. I know that's a weird thing to fixate on, but between Maxima's collection and the uniform boots, I draw a lot of them.

Fun fact. Alf is short for Alien Life Form. I assume most of you know that. I don't know why I assume that, beyond you guys being generally pop-culture savvy. And by pop-culture, I mean a TV show from 1986. But that's fine, pop-culture has a long tail. I'm not sure what the cutoff is. OG Star Trek and Doctor Who are still fair game, but the Frank Nelson reference from a few pages back is probably borderline. Presumably references from the court of Louie the 14th is too old to count as pop-culture... but that's a bad example because that stuff wasn't broadcast to the masses anyway.

I'm not sure where pop-culture" starts actually. The original comic strips in newspapers? The first movies? Maybe the first plays? Even if those were super popular, they'd ultimately have a limited audience due to physical considerations of attendance. I think mass literacy is a requirement before you can have broadly consumed culture" as it were. A quick googling shows that England passed the Forster's Education Act in 1870, which, after a few tweaks, led to mandatory primary education by 1891. So, I guess pop-culture could have started to exist any time after that, at least in the English speaking world.

Then again, stuff like Beowulf has been around since 975 AD, so who can really say.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!