Chelsea and Millie

Welcome to the darkest panel to appear in a Chelsea and Millie comic thus far.
Many many thanks to the fascinating Vas Littlecrow for translating the Spanish for me on this one.
Check out her stuff I say, and see what I mean when I say “fascinating” (contains links to some NSFW material).
Tom and I are currently sorting out taking on board a regular translator (who comes from Mexico, woot!) for Chiquita’s occasional forays into her first language, but I wrote the dialogue on this page before this came about.

There is… a lot going on in this page, and although I’m not big on explaining my work too much (I much prefer to leave it up to readers to draw their own conclusions on the layers and general content within my comics — the readily apparent, and the more hidden things, etcetera), I’d like to mention here that Ju-on: The Grudge is one of my favourite SpookyFilms, and panel one is obviously* a (dark-hearted) homage to the classic onryō antics goin’ on within that film.

“Excuse me ma’am, do you have a moment to talk about the Lord?”

For added flavor I have prepared for you an edit of a certain tune (and a bit of a rough edit at that, hahaa) that I was first exposed to when I was around 16 years of age, as said edit contains an approximation of the vocal sounds Chiquita is making as she looms maliciously over that poor little baby.

And now I shall leave you with an excerpt of an email relating to this page that I emailed Tom a while ago (I tend to email him loooong emails about C&M), which goes into more depth about what is presented here. Text has been censored slightly to fit within the PGR-rating of this site. Ahem.

“At that time in which this panel took place [Chiquita’s] mind had gone to the point where she was often seriously unhinged, and motivated by cruel, brutal and nasty intentions that had been slowly poisoning her mind for a long bunch of years.
A combination of extreme loneliness, no-one to confide in or understand her pain, cabin fever, plus all sorts of other psychically-eroding crap over the decades has pushed her right off the edge of reason.

There is no doubt in my mind that she ****ing hates that baby. To her its newborn purity/innocence and fleshy representation of life deserves to be tortured and tormented mercilessly via sudden outbursts of intense scaremongering that it is utterly incapable of processing. For this baby is a symbol of everything that fate took away from her, and how dare it mock her with its presence in her house.

[…] it’s a dark-hearted form of metaphysical solipsism that Chiquita Nereida Zapatero y Hernandez has fallen into here, and she probably ended up doing some life-long psychic damage to that baby.

If it’s any consolation though, nowadays she is extremely remorseful over her having most likely done such damage to an innocent little infant. She feels very, very ashamed of herself whenever she thinks about it.”

So, yeah, this little spook has a rather nasty dark side to her soul.
And a fairly eclectic taste in TV, too, of which I am merely scratching the very surface here.
She’s a complicated creature, that Chiquita.
She’s not necessarily good, not necessarily evil — the term I have coined for her role within the Chelsea and Millie comic series is that of an “agathokakological antagonist”. She is good and bad, like we all are. Whether or not she is driven by good or bad intentions at any given time though is not something one can predict with much in the way of accuracy.

If anybody knows what the butterfly on the crib’s head-board is a reference to, well then, you have my eternal respect.

*If you’re familiar with the Ju-on/Grudge films, that is…