Friend Vs. Friend (Vs. Shih-Tzu)

Bonus today: I made wallpaper! My favorite kind, too — a repeating pattern like wall-wallpaper, instead of a single large image.

“Full” color 1920×1080 | 1280×1024 | 1024×768 | tile for tiling

All blue 1920×1080 | 1280×1024 | 1024×768 | tile for tiling

All pink 1920×1080 | 1280×1024 | 1024×768 | tile for tiling

29 Comments

Watch out Cherry! Crazy eyes has her sights on you!
Love Honey’s face in panel one, maybe it’s the angle but her facial proportions seem different.

Oh man, it’s going to be like Single White Female but with instruments! I hope puppy doesn’t go out the window D:

I noticed the change in Honey’s face too. The mouth is different; it’s a sexier look. Maybe new friends bring that out in her.

I drew her mouth bigger and shinier because she’s singing with enthusiasm! …That’s how human anatomy works, right? Right? …Good thing this is a universe that’s always allowed a certain amount of elastic in facial expressions.

Hmmm, I’m conflicted.
On one hand, Being mean to animals is bad.
On the other hand, small dog non-stop yipping is the most horrible sound to ever exsist and should be stopped at all cost.
So is Soda sweet a cruel sociopath or a angel sent from heaven?

There are a couple of world-class yippy dogs living down the hall from me. I wish I could master a stare that’d stop ’em in their tracks.
I’m completely not a dog person; however, my favorites are actually the tiny little toy breeds like these guys. Big dogs freak me out.

If Scooby Doo has taught us anything, it’s that monsters never attack the malt shop. It’s neutral territory.

Lesson Two is to stay the hell away from amusement parks and long hallways with a lot of doors in a row.

The best pal must go! -twitch- I just realized she pretty much always making this face —-> (o_0)

Yup, I’m pretty sure this isn’t going to end well now. Though it’s really cute how Cherry is all jealous.

I find it interesting the newbie has very little color variation compared to the other bandmates.

Yeah, she has a definite o_0 face! She just needs some hair curls to have her own emoticon. Let’s see if I can…YES:
§o_0§

Fun fact about Cherry, since she’s so rarely in the spotlight: she’s straight (which, with these characters, is definitely not a default assumption unless proven otherwise).

Its always been my thought that Friendships and Relationships only ever had a few differences the main being lust. So its understandable that cherry would feel jealous but in a platonic way.

But it doesn’t seem like anyone really likes the girl. I’d feel bad because its sad in a way how desperate she seems. But sometimes a persons instincts are right with no other clue than being uncomfortable around them.

My favorite thing is the little row of identical musical notes coming from the Keytar. It’s like the best possible indictment of the Keytar! I also like “She’s the coolest! SHE THINKS JUST LIKE ME” I also like the TERRIFYING FORESHADOWING.

The keytar music notes were my favorite part of this one!

I feel you deserve to know, Kathleen, that thanks to BVB I decided to pull up a Siouxsie and the Banshees station on Pandora, just to see what was up.

Snazzy stuff!

Yessss!
If you feel like digging into full albums (which I think is well worth it!), my recommendation is that the totally definitive best one to start with is Juju. It’s probably got like four or five of my 10 favorite Banshees tracks.

From there, I’d say the path is to go for The Scream if you like the straight-up punk roots, Kaleidoscope if you like the more experimental stuff and the flirting with synths and electronics, and either Hyaena or Tinderbox if you like the full-on mid-80s goth-melancholy-electric sparkle. After that, Join Hands, Kiss in The Dreamhouse, and any miscellaenea from the 70s and early 80s are solid, and I get less interested in everything post-’88 or so (Peep Show/Superstition/The Rapture).
Agree/disagree, other Siouxsie fans?

marry me

Sure — why not?

Kathleen: Agree that Juju is the best starting place, but WHAT re: yr ranking Kiss in the Dreamhouse down with Join Hands!!

Kiss in the Dreamhouse is the CD that I’ve lost that I most regret losing, and has the two songs that made me Love Siouxsie: “Cascades” and “Greenfingers”. Every other song is Also Good — like the opening to “Obsession” that’s this really horrifying constrained little melody played over and over, the languors of “Melt!”, the single hits of “She’s a Carnival,” the weird experimental “Circles” — only song I don’t like is “Painted Bird,” and I still KIND OF like it.

WHEREAS. Join Hands has like a twenty minute version of The Lord’s Prayer that is not good, and Tinderbox has some good songs — Cities in Dust, Lullaby, The Sweetest Chill — but except for the last, they don’t especially *have* to be Siouxsie songs (does this make sense? Like “Spellbound” or “Dazzle” obviously HAVE to be Siouxsie songs), and the rest of the album is kinda dreadful (like the song about how it’s NOT NINETY ONE OR NINETY THREE BUT NINETY TWO DEGREES, ugh, or the endless THIS UNREST.) And yeah Kaleidoscope and The Scream are Classics and all I GUESS, but they’re still kind of shaky compared to the instant assured quality of Juju and Kiss in the Dreamhouse. :ike listen to “Hybrid” again, which is a pretty par cut from Kaleidoscope, and it’s like there are ten immediately obvious ways to improve it. (Granted, the album also has “Christine” and “Skin” and the creepy photography song.) Hyaena is cool in its own way, but other than Dazzle and a Beatles cover that’s not as good as the original (contrary to the “Helter Skelter” cover on Scream), all the songs could easily be Castlevania tracks, which is neat in its own way but NOT WHAT I WANT FROM MY SIOUXSIE CDs.

Granted, I agree that late Banshees are markedly less good (though I dig Kiss Them For Me and I like that they covered obscure drunk-in-his-basement Bob Dylan songs like “This Wheel’s On Fire”), and that they are only for the Completist. And there is no disputing such matters of taste. But something about the pairing of Kiss in the Dreamhouse with Join Hands — which is the only Siouxsie album I’ve listened to only maaaaaybe twice all the way through, and one of those times because I was on a long car trip and had no other CD; pretty much I just bought it so I could listen to “Icon” whenever I wanted — offends! Kiss in the Dreamhouse has a song that is about marrying a SENTIENT TREE, and every other song is similarly Juju-good.

>:(

I KNEW you loved A Kiss in The Dreamhouse and would take issue with my relatively low ranking of it!
I dunno — I like it a lot, but it just doesn’t escalate into LOVE that often for me (though I suppose I do love Circle, and She’s A Carnival). In my mind, the totally essential albums are Juju, Kaleidoscope, and The Scream…and of others, both Hyaena and Tinderbox (though each admittedly have some duds) have more stuff I love than KITD. Most of Tinderbox kind of makes me weirdly sad in this great way I can’t quite explain. Maybe this is not logically valid, or aesthetically defensible!
And Join Hands is like…it definitely feels like it’s a weird left-turn of an album with some bad decisions in it, but they’re *interesting* bad decisions, and I’ve got a hell of a weakness for everything they did in the 70s where it’s not really synthy yet.

also: I have been thinking about this, and my two all-time favorite Siouxsie songs are probably Head Cut and Skin, which are also incidentally like the most macabre possible choices.

I should be working on my website like I planned but instead it’s time to make a Top Ten Favorite Siouxsie song list, in descending order:

Dazzle
The Sweetest Chill
Green Fingers
Spellbound
Icon
Into the Night
Cascades
Christine
Kiss Them For Me
Arabian Nights

I think this is because I’m much less inclined to like punk Siouxsie than I am to like dream epic weird instrumentation Siouxsie — like for example Peek-A-Boo would completely not be on this list were it not for the accordion. Part of the glory of Siouxsie though is that there can literally NEVER EVER be consensus about what her good songs are, or even like WHAT IS GOOD ABOUT HER. For example, SHOCKING CONFESSION: I don’t really like Happy House that much! I mean it’s plainly a good song, and I am delighted when it comes on, but it’s not like with something like Dazzle where I have to stop what I’m doing to listen to it in detail. The measure of how good an art thing is is how many different viable roads can lead to it in not obvious ways maybe?

Like canonically, The Beatles: virtually every song is a valid entry point, and there are infinitely many legitimate reasons for using such songs as entry points. But with the Beatles you can kind of see how various combinations of four people produced these different songs, and different group members obviously dominate different compositions. With Siouxsie it’s like this one person just magically generates eight gazillion different sounds and moods in a really short period of time. I imagine her like spending most of her time in a weird garden library lined with ivies and roses reading fat books of esoterica, then emerging with completely new musical ideas and songs about Curiosities roughly every year, then returning to hibernation. Every album is a new fantastical molting!

I take your challenge to do a top 10! This was tough, but chronologically:

Carcass
Mirage
Red Light
Skin
Head Cut
Monitor
Night Shift
Voodoo Dolly
Dazzle
Party’s Fall

Only one (outstanding) overlap with yours! Mine definitely leans earlier and guitarier, — this is like a microcosm of a core aesthetic split that you and I have always had! Like you said, there’s no wrong way to have a Favorite Siouxsie list…and I love that yours is SO YOU.
Also, on the other end of the spectrum, I think I’m the only person who thinks there’s something totally outstanding about the dancey-upbeat-yet-melancholy Party’s Fall.
If I expanded this to 20, it’d definitely have more of the weirdly-instrumented numbers and floaty dreamscapes — maybe even either Scarecrow or The Killing Jar from Peep Show, which I had previously deemed outside the timeframe of The Ones I Like. Listening to it again, it’s more like it has two or three songs I deeeeeeply dislike, several I’m indifferent to, and a couple of dramatic high points that I’d forgotten.
I also feel like, for some reason, most of the whole first half of Kaleidoscope (Tenant/Trophy/Hybrid/Clockface) is top ten for me if I can consider it one looooong piece, but none of the individual songs quite do it on their own.

I actually love Siouxsie’s album Mantaray..

She’s amazing spanning several decades, but I have a way harder time getting into the later stuff, and the non-Banshees stuff. Maybe I should give that one another shot.

no Kathleen DON’T TAINT YOURSELF

I actually revisited the later Banshees albums over the weekend, and they pretty much all have at least one “oh shit, that’s GREAT” moment for me, even though like 99% of my interest in the band is in the earlier stuff.

I predict that Soda Sweet is actually un-dead.

-G.

We’ll see! 😀

I am reading this YEARS after it was first published, but I wanted to comment before I continued through the archive. I’ve been going through all of the comments (I totally missed the pling-pling-pling indictment of the keytar that Jeanne pointed out!), and I’m listening to the recommendations, too — “Juju” is playing right now!

But I wanted to add this untimely comment to say what strikes me is how unhealthily pale Soda Sweet comes across. I mean, she’s the same white as all of the other characters, but the lack of color to her face and her pale blue hair & clothes gives her a very… dead?… appearance. IT’S AMAZING, and quite unsettling.