#cry fox

[drjohnweston]

Needle felting, embroidery and beading inspired by the Cry Fox cover art. It's going on the back of a jacket 🦊

[in-a-trans-like-state]

im desperately and sadly failing at finding anywhere to read the rivers of london graphic novels as my library only has the first one 

[sixth-light]

So, as someone who is just reading the comic runs once they're finished and collected - do you recommend Cry Fox? I just see that you have mixed feelings about it, but is it enough to maybe tell people to skip it?

That would totally depend on your reaction to the comics generally - it wasn’t Black Mould, and there was lots of Sahra and Abigail being awesome and working together, which was great. If you’ve more or less liked the comics as a whole I would absolutely recommend reading it.

The problem for me was, more or less, that all Sahra and Abigail’s awesomeness was functionally negated in the denouement to the extent that if they had done nothing at all they still would have been rescued by Nightingale in the same way, and that was disappointing. (Also I don’t particularly enjoy reading about Reynard being a creep, but no surprises there.) Apart from that it was pretty solid/middle of the pack as the comics have gone.

[sixth-light]

Cry Fox really solidified my willingness to pick and choose what I count as canon from the comics, because it turns out that while ghosts and talking foxes and flying wizards* do not break my suspension of disbelief, favoured characters undergoing serious danger and trauma and knowing it will never have any ongoing effects** shatters it into tiny pieces. 

And, to be fair, it can’t really have ongoing serious effects because book readers can’t be expected to process events from the comics like that, the comics are canonical but interstitial. But it makes things in the comics feel much less weighty and real than anything in the books, and therefore easier to ignore. 

*this is not spoilers except for the series in general, only one of these things happens in Cry Fox and you can’t tell me it isn’t obvious which one 

**ironically, the comics are now the only part of canon which has really acknowledged the effect on Peter of the whole Simone thing even briefly past the end of MoS, but I’m happy to cherrypick that

[sixth-light]

Cry Fox #2

GO ABIGAIL but also AHHHHH ABIGAIL

- Abigail is so smart and onto it and trying to rescue herself and I love her very much

- I could interrogate her use of the past tense about her mum but I’m not going to because I suspect it’s not actually meaningful

- also AHHHHH SAHRA Jesus Christ these people are awful

- for like ten seconds I thought the posh old lady might be Lady Helena but it’s not which is, frankly, a relief (and that wasn’t Chorley and Lesley either, which is good for Abigail)

- could Reynard be any worse? Apparently yes!

- I hope the foxes tell that young blonde woman to get the fuck away from him

- also it’s simultaneously a relief and worrying that he’s blackmailing the talking foxes, not working with them (but what’s with the foxes having standard human names????)

- I find it interesting that this is clearly framed as Abigail having recounted what happened to her to Peter-as-narrator, rather than being from Abigail’s PoV per se (vs the bits from Lesley’s PoV in Night Witch or Nightingale’s in Body Work)

- I hadn’t expected Reynard’s t-shirt from Broken Homes to come back in such a specific way, but…WELP

- uh. Happy things. Stephanopoulos visiting the Folly! Nightingale keeps leaving his phone places! Molly routinely returns it to him as passive-aggressively as possible!

- seriously I know I have this whole thing about Peter NOT killing people but, uh, if he wanted to set this lot on fire I…would not object.

- I mean not fatally. Necessarily. Just…on fire.

[sixth-light]

Cry Fox #1

This one kinda snuck up on me somehow (probably the lack of preview Friday pages from BA’s twitter) but it’s here, and there is a LOT going on. 

I find it interesting how Varvara is slowly transitioning into a comics character, with this story following up on Night Witch - although if she’s teaching Abigail magic...

...that explains why BA was asking for translations of the basic formae into Greek and Cyrillic lettering on Twitter the other day (I guess the Russians use Greek as their language of magic, which makes sense because Byzantium) 

...and also made me CACKLE ALOUD when I read it, because a) I was so hoping we’d get Abigail learning magic from some of the female practitioners around, and b) the idea that Peter and Nightingale are still trying to avoid teaching her is hilarious. 

In general there were lots of women going to other women in this issue. Abigail hanging out with Molly, Ludmilla and Stephanopoulos (who maybe wants kids but doesn’t have them?), Abigail and Anya. It was great. 

Speaking of which, 1) oh, god, Abigail - she’s still young enough to be more trusting than she should be, even though she comes across as so suspicious to Peter. I hope this doesn’t traumatise her too much. 

2) Anya seems way older than she should be based on her appearance in Night Witch. She’s presented there as a little girl, maybe five or six, and here she doesn’t look that much younger than Abigail. Peter is a DC so we’re post-the frame story for Detective Stories, which is itself post-The Hanging Tree, which means it’s probably, hmm, mid-2015-ish, so Abigail is getting on for 16. Night Witch happens in late 2013...anyway, Anya looks a lot more than two years older to me. < / pedantry> 

The kidnappers: Lesley and Chorley, y/y? Way more petty criminals, way less Moriarty. 

Reynard’s back! That was a surprise, because I would have sworn that plot thread would pick up in a book. And using the foxes. And...ugh everything about Reynard is awful I hope he comes to a terrible end. Maybe he and Chorley can kill each other a la the ending of Leverage Season 4. I WOULDN’T MIND. JUST SAYING. 

And we haven’t even covered a second magical pub and its denizens, Varvara, Peter, and Nightingale hanging out, Ludmilla being told to contact her mum who’s presumably still involved with official Russian magic (Chorley & Lesley + the Russian government: even only in the smallest of potentios, FUCKING HELL), and Peter, Walid, and Guleed eating pizza, adorably. 

One last persnick: ABDUL WHY ARE YOU STILL WEARING GLOVES TO CUT FOOD THAT IS NOT OKAY THAT IS GROSS THAT IS HOW YOU GET SALMONELLA I HAVE ABOUT TWENTY NURSING STUDENTS YOU CAN ASK IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE ME YOUR GLOVES ARE THERE TO PROTECT YOU TAKE. THEM. OFF. BEFORE YOU TOUCH FOOD FOR GOD’S SAKE. < / wet lab biologist feelings>

[sixth-light]

So now that Furthest Station is out long enough I'd like to ask what your take on the foxes is? Is the one Abigail talked to in WU one of them Peter heard her talking to in Furthest Station or are those different foxes? And do you think we'll see more of them in the main story? (excluding the comic's right now)

I think it’s fairly certain at this point the fox Abigail talked to in Whispers Underground was related to (or one of the same foxes) she talks to in The Furthest Station, and definitely not Reynard (side note: THANK FUCKING GOD). As to what they are exactly - they’re magical talking foxes, and if there’s an in-book explanation for why magical talking foxes it’s probably going to involve them moving into urban spaces and people noticing how clever they were getting. 

Whether we’ll see more of them in the main story...I expect they’ll be mentioned, but it’s pretty obvious that the next comic run is going to pick up on something to do with them based on the title and cover art. I suspect they’re enough of a worldbuilding side note that the heavy lifting might happen there. TFS set up a minor mystery for them with the thing at High and Over House, and I would bet on that being resolved in the comic rather than a later book. But that’s mostly because there’s so much plot that could go in the books these days, something has to give somewhere. The comics have already been used to resolve a dangling book thread (Varvara). 

[sixth-light]

rosedotnoire replied to your post “Cry Fox #1”

I’m not 100% sure, but I don’t think Chorley and Lesley are the kidnappers. They both know that taking Abigail would bring down holy hell. And despite my anger at Lesley, I still feel like she’d balk at hurting young girls.

I could go either way - they don’t obviously use magic, and their apparent genders and ages are the only things that really made me think that’s who it was. (That, and the fact that they have a known connection to Ludmilla and Anya - Lesley nicked the ransom money last time.) Thin threads, and I won’t be shocked if it’s not them.

On the other hand, neither of them have been reluctant to bring down holy hell before, and Lesley....I think could convince herself that the girls weren’t really going to get hurt quite easily. I mean, she’s still in cahoots with a guy who was all set to torture a seventeen-year-old girl to death before some wayward Americans and Peter accidentally intervened. Kidnapping is much lower-grade than that.