Events
ThoughtBubble
14 Nov 2026 – 15 Nov 2026
Harrogate Convention Centre
Manchester Megacon
31 Jul 2027 – 1 Aug 2027
Manchester Central
there sure is a crowd!
Just wait until all the first class passengers get to their lawyers!
good im so glad pryce feels like shit. i can't wait for him to find out Thea is alive and well just so she can leave him again a second time on purpose this time!!
Pryce may have convinced Thea to help with the anchor plan despite her reservations, but even with his own selfishness, he really did love her. Kate did a great job of drawing the pure, tragic horror on his face.
I think the colouring of the whole panel also does a lot for the emotion! I'm not sure but it looks like the lines of everyone else are slightly tinted also (like in Curtain Call when people were under spirits' influence) which looks really effective!
hey, you might be right! The hand in front of him looks like has brown lineart. Good catch!
He really does look devastated. I never felt sorry for him before, but I do now.
What makes you think he's missing his daughter? Perhaps he's devastated because he failed to obtain an Anchor for his country.
Or not.
“What makes you think he's missing his daughter?”
This:
And this:
[https://uploads.disquscdn.c...](https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b7ba329cbfa0fea1e7ea7717754a73332505416e90b0aa9782abd7a90601530a.jpg "https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b7ba329cbfa0fea1e7ea7717754a73332505416e90b0aa9782abd7a90601530a.jpg")
Which last I choose to interpret as "authorial intent."
Valid points.
I wonder how much of his love for Thea is true, selfless, sacrificial love and how much of it is affection and how much of it is seeing her as a prized possession. I doubt he even knows, or if he even knows there's a difference. The lines between them can get awfully blurry.
Frankly, I don't feel all that sorry for Pryce.
He was willing to let Chile get wiped out, and who knows who else, just to get richer.
If he has any humanity left in him, he'll have a thought for how miserable others would have felt, just as he feels now... but I don't know that he does.
He's got a long, hard road ahead of him if he's going to try for any sort of redemption. And I fear that is not the road he'll take.
Yeah, I feel bad for him only in proportion to how much he learns and works to make up for this. The grief he's feeling is what he was trying to do to millions of people, and their grief at losing loved ones didn't bother him at the time.
For that matter, Thea was willing to do it too, and we still don't know what lessons she's taken from whatever deal she made.
That said, Lei tried to do something like this and was just as dismissive of unforseen consequences, so it is possible to turn away from that and try to help others do the same. But getting the loaded gun away from the supervillain before they can shoot it -- and making them face consequences if they did shoot it -- always comes before saving their soul, imo
I see Thea as a very pointed lesson in how utilitarianism can go horribly, HORRIBLY wrong when people - and indeed, life itself - are reduced to mathematical statistics.
Yeah, a sort of proactive utilitarianism. Rather than choosing between the tracks in the trolley problem, choosing whether or not to start the train to get the goods where you want them, knowing there are people on the tracks.
I mean, isn't that one of the main critiques if utilitarianism? That it seems to demand awful things of people in the name of the "the greater good"?
Yeah I'm pointing and laughing like that Simpsons character.
I don't know. I don't think he looks "I just lost my daughter" grieved, I think he looks more deeply haunted than that. Hopefully there is a hearty dose of "what did I nearly do to all those people? What did I nearly do to everyone on the ship? How could I push my daughter and all those people to take such a risk?" and not just a selfish "look how this has personally impacted me"
It could always turn out like Jack Skellington, though, two seconds of "what have I done" ending in "what the heck, I did my best, and I really gave them something swell!" (That song always makes me facepalm)
To be fair, Jack realized halfway through those lines that he seriously scared the [expletive deleted] out of a lot of people, which is supposed to be his actual job - and one he hadn't been really excited about lately.
I don't always read the comments section so sorry if this was discussed pages and pages ago, but it only just occurred to me that maybe the anchors are also balanced by elevation as well as distance, so the 4th anchor is underwater because the opposite anchor is in the mountains. If so, Pryce succeeding could have been VERY bad for pretty much everyone in the Himalayas as well as everyone in Chile.
Well, we don't really know that moving one anchor would alter the other anchors in any way, but it's definitely better to be safe than sorry.
It's not impossible they're all interconnected so it could have caused a wreck in most of the world. Which is why we don't screw with crap we don't understand!
I like the angry baby in panel 3.
even the baby wants a refund
Amateurs! A proper angry mob has pitchforks and burning torches!
If they had thought ahead to pack those, they probably wouldn't have made the voyage. Not enough certainty.
In this land of opportunity, I'm surprised there wasn't a stall on the harbour selling them.
Cotton candy! Can't have an angry mob without cotton candy!
I beg your pardon, but these people are important (ie rich) enough to have other people carry torches and pitchforks for them.
Had they been born a century or so later, they'd be investing in cloud-native pitchfork-as-a-service. On the blockchain.
Crowd-sharing pitchchains for busy solutions-oriented, community direction-implementers.
You. You get it.
The background around Pryce in the last panel is all black--which is probably what his world feels like now.
I wonder how selective Lei was about her own history with grand theft Anchor.
v e r y
Grand Theft Anchor, I see what you did there
My work here is done.
Dang, I have to really give it to Kate for drawing an angry crowd scene /twice/ in basically the same positions, rather than just using a zoom in on the second panel. That takes a lot of effort! claps
haha thanks! i actually used a zoomed version as a guide and did a lil tracing but budged things around a bit, cus i wanted the moment of those two panels to feel like it was only taking place over like, a second or two.
America: "Quite solid on consumer rights" - okay now I'm sold on migrating to this extremely alternate history.
Maybe it's more a time period thing. I don't know when most of our anti-trust and other consumer-protection laws came about (other than the one that says your warranty can't be voided because you tried to fix a gadget yourself, which is from the 70s) but the comic is definitely set before the deliberate weakening (or moratorium on enforcement) of those laws in the latter half of the 20th century.
It was indeed spread along a long period.
(checking) Uh, the first US anti-trust law is from 1890, with [Sherman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act").
I would have wrongly said just after the Great Depression, 1930-ish. Fuzzy memories of my history lessons in highschool (I'm not in the US).
The laws protecting the consumer against tainted or unsafe foodstuff or drugs- that the FDA is about - are spread across a century, with the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 as a key milestone in time. Took a few more iterations to block some loopholes and adapt the laws as society/science marched on.
And as you said, some special interests are interested at making the FDA and other agencies less interested, and some attempts at defanging them were successful.
It's interesting, the comic's period is indeed around a key time where some legislators/politicians were successfully building-up consumer protection.
Thanks! Yeah, that makes sense.
Yes, but thanks to Federalism consumer protections in the US differ from state to state. Texas' "consumer protection" agency was created to protect businesses from consumers.
Sadly that also makes sense.
I think the key point here is that many of the consumers in question are also very, very wealthy.
(I'm in the US, and I work in the broader consumer protection space, specifically in the domain of financial inclusion.)
First, Pryce is in trouble for exactly the kind of thing you'd expect him to be in trouble about in the infinitely litigious US: noncompliance with a contract. In this case, he sold all those tickets with an implied contract to deliver the passengers to Europe. Whether the disclaimers which go with the ticket would apply would be a very interesting legal point: he asserted that he was going to get them to Europe when he actually had no intention of so doing...the newspapers are going to have a field day about the resulting trial.
Second, though, in the more specific case of consumer protection law, no. The 1830's were not a period in which modern consumer protection law was at all a topic of discussion in the US. The major questions at that time were (1) westward expansion and colonial power in the Americas (recall that the Monroe Doctrine was published in 1823), and (2) slavery.
The anti-trust movement didn't really get started until after the Civil War's end, and modern consumer protection laws weren't on the docket until considerably later. (E.g. the FDIC was created in 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act wasn't passed until 1934, 100 years after Widdershins.)
As an aside, that's probably why you think of US consumer protection law being mostly related to the Great Depression. Most of it actually was.
And here I thought it was just because the subject was greatly depressing. ;)
I sometimes rather badly want to write out the Widdershins Universe's 19th century American history. European history, too, but I know more American history. :)
Ha! And last comic I was thinking it might make a fun bonus comic page to see what kind of Yelp reviews the passengers might have left about this trip.
Nitpicking: the law officer writing down Lei's declaration seems right-handed in the first panel, but is definitively left-handed in panels 2 and 3.
(at my small workplace, luck has it that I, right-handed, has a majority of left-handed colleagues. That made me noticing left-handed people more)
he is ambidextrous and fancied a shift about
(Next page: Officer untying one shoe mid-notetaking as he fancies yet another way to use his writing implement) ;-)
Don't worry about it, Pryce. Thea's got plot armor now! She couldn't be safer.
I'm hoping that Pryce represents Kate's sentiments about a certain type of person, rather than "Americans," in general. Then again, I can't think of a single instance where Widdershins included a likeable American. ...
[Rosie Bell from Hotel Gula](https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/search/Rosie%20Bell/ "https://www.widdershinscomic.com/wdshn/search/Rosie%20Bell/")
Okay but the officers who have strong feelings about consumer rights are ALSO American so like just on this page we have a group of American jerks and also a group of Americans doing the right thing.
I think pretty much all represented ethnicities have had good and bad.
While yeah the anchor theft migth not be a law, I think his main crime was trying to flood Chile
Has to be some form of reckless endangerment. Not sure if he can be prosecuted for it in America or extradited to Chile, but in an extreme case like this you can bet the government could find a justification to punish him if it really wanted to.
Looking it up: at the time there's a trade treaty with Chile and an ambassador, and it's very new: no more than a few years old. Relations with Chile were fairly decent during this time period, since the USA had given South American revolutionaries both overt and covert assistance to peel them off from Spain. If Chile ever finds out about this little situation, they'll feel comfortable yelling about it.
As to Price: Andy Jackson probably won't give two sh*ts about how pissed-off a bunch of rich people are about their boat trip. Nobody in that crowd votes Democratic-Republican, and they DEFINITELY won't have voted for Jackson. But it's a good excuse to get Pryce... in alignment with the needs of the United States of America. I wonder what excuse South Carolina's come up with for Nullification, in this timeline?
Are we sure he's not super depressed about the financial losses he's about to incrue and not the loss of his daughter?
Pryce's expression in the last panel is utterly perfect; it makes me think of those nightmares where you're stuck in a really terrible situation, which you caused, but you can't understand why you did the awful thing you did -- but you did do it, and now you're stuck with the consequences. Except he can't look forward to waking up.
American government being solid on consumer rights? Now I know for sure this is fiction.