Comic:Bruised Oranges
From CGWiki
| Bruised Oranges | |
|---|---|
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| Artist: | Keaton Miller |
| Writer: | Keaton Miller |
| Characters: | Arthur Peabody, Abigail Sabal, Earl Sabal |
| Updates: | Updates, usually on Wednesdays. Currently on a small hiatus to re-draw the first 8 pages for consistency, scheduled to resume in late summer. |
| Began: | August 7, 2007 |
| Ended: | |
| Art style: | Black and white full pages |
| Rating: | Web-MA |
| Website | Website |
Bruised Oranges is a comic about sex, drugs, and steam power. Sometimes all three at once! It's also about spitting in the face of decency for personal amusement, rejecting others' pre-conceived notions about one's self, and growing up. But mostly, it's just a rubbish penny dreadful tale with a hearty helping of good ol' American sex, violence, and true love with a dash of local folklore here and there. If you really want to get technical about the genre, it can be called "steambilly," since it lacks the elegance of of true steampunk but just the right amount of ruralness to be considered hillbilly.
It takes place in turn-of-the-century northeast Florida, in a fictional locale called Gator Creek. It's roughly estimated to be somewhere on the outskirts of Jacksonville, along an offshoot of the St. John's River. The year when the comic begins is 1898. Gator Creek is a small town, mostly made up of residential living and a couple family-owned farms and orange groves as well as a single Catholic church run by a grumpy Spanish priest. The area is made up of overgrown grasses, scrubby underbrush, and a good bit of swampland inhabited by all sorts of ornery creatures, ranging from the alligators the region was named for, to one alleged skunk ape dwelling in the palmetto underbrush. And for the record, Abbie isn't the skunk ape. We all know she smells pretty awful sometimes and doesn't like to shave (heck, shaving probably wasn't that big of a deal to women back then), but she's not that hairy or smelly!
Contents |
Plot
As the story hasn't been going for very long yet, I'm not going to go into detail for the sake of spoilers.
Chapter One: Ticking
Summary to be put in when the chapter is concluded.
Characters
Major characters
| Character | Age | Appearance | Bio/description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arthur Charles Peabody | 25 |  | Our unfortunate protagonist, a London native who left his home to move to Florida in search of warm weather and a tranquil, exotic environment. He got a little more than he bargained for in the form of a mechanical, watch-powered heart and a metal arm. Arthur Peabody hates his life. |
| Abigail Susannah Sabal | 22 |  | A young Southern lady who's just a bit off her rocker, a smidgen obsessed with mechanics, and definitely harboring a stalker-like infatuation for the local pharmacist. She has chosen Arthur as the unwilling object of her affections, mostly because she's enamored by the way he "talks funny" and his adorably inept, blubbering reactions to her flirtations and very thinly-veiled innuendos. |
| Alexander Earl Eugene Sabal | 24 |  | Call him "Earl." The CEO of the Sabal Rail Company after his father passed away, he has an overbite that would make most horses blush. He may or may not have a thing for his sister, but is overall a fairly soft-spoken gentleman who seems to be the only reasonably well-adjusted member of the cast. |
| Rebbecca Tabitha Greenbriar | 26 | Image pending; A tall, dark, and rather dashing young woman. | A longtime friend of Abigail's, as alien as the notion of Abigail having friends is. First seen in the church arc, there's more to her than she lets on to the public face. How she acts in church is merely a front. The real deal with her will be shown at a later date. ;) |
| Governor Pennywort | 47 | Not yet introduced. | Not yet introduced. |
Minor characters
| Character | Age | Appearance | Bio/description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Father Olegario Serenoa | 57 | Black hair, balding, long nose. | The local priest, and one who has grown weary of Abigail's hedonistic outlook on life. He tends to be fairly nosy and considers himself to be on top of the town's gossip wheel and enjoys (for the most part) hearing out everybody's problems and offering spiritual guidance to the best of his ability. Well, except in cases where he's considered a person more or less a lost hope after many repeated attempts to help out. Like, say, Abigail. He's had it up to here with her. |
| "Granpaw" Silas Obadiah Sabal | 60 | A grizzled old man in the attic. | Not yet introduced in the comic, but he is the grandfather of Abigail and Earl. He lives in the attic, drinks a lot, and is a Civil War veteran. He served as a field medic for the Confederate army, amputating many a limb from injured soldiers and passing on his medical knowledge to his grandchildren, who were fascinated by his gruesome war stories. |
| Mr. Beauregard Dogwood | 54 | A blond, heavyset man with a glorious set of muttonchops. | The town butcher of Gator Creek, and a retired heavyweight boxer. Short of temper and prone to alcoholism, he's recently tried to turn his life around and started helping out at the church in his spare time. He's mainly in charge of ushering, but can be called upon to keep some of the more unruly churchgoers in line at Father Serenoa's behest. Mr. Dogwood has perfected picking up and throwing Abigail out of church like a ragdoll into a fine art. |
Detailed backstory: Arthur
The youngest son of Cornelius and Elizabeth Peabody, Arthur never got along with his family terribly well. He grew up constantly picked on by his brothers, becoming horribly insecure and left the country primarily to get away from his family, and to expand his knowledge in pharmaceutical work secondarily.
A few months before the story begins, Arthur opens up Peabody's General Goods and Medicines on Forsyth Street, in the shadow of a massive furniture warehouse. Before too long, Abigail showed up, making clumsy advances on him and referencing her supposedly awful case of female hysteria and insisting that he could help her get it cured. Badly repressed and utterly dense to the innuendo, he kept claiming that he had no cures and was baffled as to why she kept coming back. Eventually she became a permanent fixture at his counter during the day, and the pharmacist begrudgingly gained a liking for the young woman in spite of her questionable motives.
On a particularly sunny day, he offered to walk her home and helped her across the street, not necessarily paying attention to his surroundings and getting hit by a slow-moving streetcar. While this didn't kill him on the spot, he sustained injuries that would have killed him were it not for Abbie spiriting him away to her basement before professional medical care could arrive, enlisting the aid of her brother to amputate his broken arm in true Civil War-era medic fashion (as trained by their crazed veteran grandfather), and used old steel strips from outgrown corsets to put his ribs back together, replaced his heart with an elaborate machine powered by a pocketwatch welded to his spine, and topped it all off by grafting a cast iron stove plate over the open chest cavity to protect the delicate machinery inside.
This has the rather unwanted side effect of being confined to the basement of the Sabal house, subject to even less subtle sexual advances from his "rescuer." He later had his missing arm replaced with a convoluted system of cello strings attached to his remaining nerve endings, the outer shell welded together from bits of stove pipe and railroad scrap steel. The entire affair is really quite painful.
Detailed backstory: Abbie and Earl
It's said that Abbie and her brother Earl emerged one day from the Florida swampland, but those are dirty, dirty lies. She is the daughter of Phineas and Jezebel Sabal, who were cousins of each other. Since her mother died while giving birth to her, Abigail had little in the way of feminine influence growing up and her father knew very little about raising a little girl and managing a rail company at the same time. So, to cut time, he raised her the same way he raised Earl, after many many failed attempts to teach the girl domestics. She so very loved the pastime of taking watches apart and putting them back together, and spent summers dominating the living room with nigh-endless Rube Goldberg machines.
Abbie matured into an abrasive, gawky, and otherwise obnoxious young woman whose very existence was offensive to the other delicate ladies of the upper class, and as such, she has very few friends and spends most of her waking hours in her brother's basement, only surfacing to visit Arthur's pharmacy and ineptly sexually harass him over the counter.
That is, until the poor sap got hit by a streetcar, resulting in his right arm getting mangled on the rails. Now he is trapped in her basement and is subject to round-the-clock attempts at molestation and peculiar upgrades to his newly-added mechanical prosthetic arm.
Earl, meanwhile, became more or less of a model citizen, responsible, well-read, fairly well-spoken and overall a perfectly swell gentleman. He is the only one in the Sabal household who is permitted to cook (as Abigail cooking lead to many a fire hazard and things that would make a health inspector blanch), and also upholds domestic tasks such as housekeeping and sewing -- more or less because Abigail won't do it herself, in spite of the typical roles of women of the day. Before their father died and he inherited the family rail business, he spent his time tinkering with and making the watches that his sister dissected from parts that he ordered from a catalog, so it's no surprise that his room is littered with watch parts.
Phineas Sabal died of yellow fever from a mosquito bite two years before the story takes place, while he was away to oversee the progress of some workers laying down the rails in southern Florida. Both of his children were devastated by his passing, but Abbie took it the worst because she was so deeply attached to her father for lack of a mother figure in her life. After their father's passing, Earl took it upon himself to protect and watch over his sister to the best of his abilities while trying to balance his social life, home life, and work life. Even as children he tried to keep her in line, but with this new responsibility of maintaining a business, it's been much more difficult to keep Abigail under control or to serve as a voice of reason for her. All he can do is cross his fingers and hope his sister is behaving herself when he's not looking!
Background
Bruised Oranges was started, initially, on a very flighty whim in early August. The artist didn't expect it to go anywhere, but like some abusive imaginary relationship, it continued to demand being drawn. Back when it began, there was no planning, there was no pre-determined plot, and the story didn't even have a title. The art sucked (as anyone can plainly see by looking at the first eight pages), the writing was bad and superfluous, and the story had no real direction at all and was just the artist farting around with and attempting to flesh out a few original characters. Nobody really knows what the plot is about, but it's probably got something to do with the governor of Florida wanting to secede from the United States by means of semi-mechanical alligators with chainsaw arms. In all honesty the artist wasn't expecting Bruised Oranges to last more than 7 pages before losing interest, but for some unknown reason it's still being updated in spite of laziness, a short attention span, and the various distractions of real life.
There's a very good chance that the comic will become absolutely filthy in later pages, and it may require the artist to up the rating to NC-17. But since nothing too atrocious or monocle-popping has happened YET, it sits precariously at an R rating that is constantly being taunted and tried by Abigail's desires to do indecent things to Arthur like she saw in an old, well-read copy of The Pearl.
Links
- http://www.bruisedoranges.com/ -- The main comic page, where the, uh, 'magic' takes place.
- http://bruisedoranges.livejournal.com/ -- The sketch blog, where lots of unpublished material and sketches get posted. May contain adult artwork, spoilers, and other sundry things, but a lot of it is just the artist farting around with whatever medium is available at the time.
Categories: Engineer | Humor | Lowtech | Mechanical | Rated Mature | Scientist | SteamPunk
