Comic:Bruised Oranges
From CGWiki
| Bruised Oranges | |
|---|---|
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| Artist: | Keaton M. |
| Writer: | Keaton M. |
| 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 sometime in the winter. |
| Began: | August 7, 2007 |
| Ended: | |
| Art style: | Black and white full pages |
| Rating: | Web-MA |
| Website | Website |
Bruised Oranges takes place in turn-of-the-century Florida, in a small, rural locale called Gator Creek. Its rough approximation is somewhere around northeast Florida, nestled in the swampy expanse some healthy distance away from Jacksonville and St. Augustine. It got its humble beginnings from attracting prospective farmers and immigrants via an advertisement in the newspaper a couple of decades before the Civil War, promising opportunity in paradise with unbelievably cheap land prices. Like most settlements that got their start by being advertised in the paper, it wasn't exactly the tropical fantasy-land it was said to be -- the alligators were mentioned, of course, although whichever shyster put up the ad conveniently forgot to mention that they were man-eating beasts and played them off to be gentle, scaly friends of nature. You can see where this is going. These "gentle" reptiles, alongside disease-carrying mosquitoes and rightly irate Seminole natives wanting their land back, quickly whittled down the early residents of Gator Creek. Some land did manage to get cultivated though, as a few orange groves and family-owned farms persist to this day.
Connected to the outside world only by a set of railroad tracks used mainly by the mail train, Gator Creek nowadays is a small town hidden away from civilization. Almost all of its residents are direct descendants of the folks who first moved down here due to that ad in the paper generations ago, as few sensible people today would find it an even remotely appealing place to live or set up shop. Arthur Peabody would probably be the only one of those few to actually move there, instead of just seeing it on a map and vaguely considering the possibility of only visiting. He even went so far as to open up a pharmacy, to compliment the only doctor in town. He didn't get much business. When people got sick, it was usually due to waking up one day with an alligator attached to their leg. Only shotguns and amputation can cure that. This, combined with the fact that Arthur was a new arrival fresh from England, didn't make him very popular in this close-knit farm town.
Bruised Oranges follows the life of Arthur in this strange, backwater town, given an impromptu crash course by the town's other outcast, Abigail Sabal. While attracted to Abbie, Arthur was born and raised an upper class turn-of-the-century gentleman, which combined with his personality means he has quite a bit of trouble expressing this effectively. Abbie, whose upbringing was nearly the polar opposite, is happy to make up for her beau's awkwardness. More than happy.
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
Our protagonist wakes up in an unfamiliar house, disorientated and slowly coming off the effects of a number of drugs.
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. A gentle-natured pharmacist, he has confessed to a love for hashish and sampling other wares of his shop in the after-hours. His prized possessions are his smoking pipe and the tiny cannabis garden he maintains in a window box at his flat above the pharmacy. |
| 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 strong infatuation for the local pharmacist. She has chosen Arthur as the (outwardly) 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. Abigail has a colorful arrest record bearing pages of counts of public drunkenness and indecency. She's the proud, loving parent of a moonshine still hidden deep in the swamp, possibly one of many establishments of question in the area. |
| 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 doesn't actually do anything, given that railroadin' was never his passion in life, so he mostly rakes up profits while quietly living his life out at home repairing clocks with his sister. He may or may not have a thing for her, 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 a front, and we'll learn more about her in the second chapter. |
| 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 a shaded corner of Decatur and Main Street, next to the butcher's shop and across the street from Gator Creek's tiny hospital. 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 while under the mind-altering effects of some ghastly cocktail of substances, 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 got knocked out and sustained injuries that would have killed him were it not for Abbie spiriting him away to her home, 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 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 and piano 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 Edna Sabal, who were cousins of each other -- one was an airheaded but lucky founder of an enterprising Floridian rail company, and the other was a prostitute. 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, but found it very stressful to divide his attention between a little boy and a baby girl -- so he invited Tabitha's mother and a longtime friend of the family, Mrs. Milly Greenbriar, to help him raise the children. Neither of them had an easy time trying to teach the girl domestics, and Mrs. Greenbriar often encouraged Abbie to do what would make her happy instead. She so very loved the pastime of taking watches apart and putting them back together, playing in the woods with Tabitha, and spent summers dominating the living room with nigh-endless Rube Goldberg-style machines. Abbie and Mrs. Greenbriar became very close over the years, to the point where Abbie sees her as an important mother figure and refers to her as her Mama, and often comes to her for guidance and support in times of need.
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 at Tabitha's garage or at home, only surfacing to visit Arthur's pharmacy and ineptly sexually harass him over the counter.
That is, until the poor sap got high and hit by a streetcar, resulting in his right arm getting mangled on the rails. Now he is trapped in her house 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 was said to have 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. 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 | Historical | Romance
