Time is relative

Despite scheduling my posts to appear at one minute past midnight on the day of publication UK time, Blogger seems to have decided that I'm working in Hong Kong and is posting everything eight hours early. Hence the strange appearance of today's strip yesterday. So let's try scheduling posts to appear at 8am for the next few days and see what happens...

Canada, eh?

Click the link to see Smith and Jones in Canada; possibly Hastings' second most famous Canadian export after Grey Owl*.
http://www.gocomics.com/sooky-rottweiler/2011/08/29

Thanks to Cynthia L'Ecuyer for doing this. It was a lovely surprise. Take a look at the rest of her strip, Sooky Rottweiller, and subscribe to it. Also, take a look at the strip she drew the day beforehand; easily the best catnip joke I've ever seen.

* Spooky coincidence: Archibald Belaney, as Grey Owl was known when he was growing up in Hastings, developed his love of nature and conservation by exploring St Helens' Woods, the very same woods that Smith and Jones have been walking through for the past month...

Millie dailies coming soon...

On Saturday September 1st, 1990 this appeared on the front page of the Daily Mirror. It would be the first and last time that Millie would be front page news.

And what was on Page 22? You've seen it already. This.

This Saturday marks the 21st anniversary of Millie's start as a daily strip and I'll be reposting them on Saturdays and Sundays in blocks of three, so you'll get a week's worth every weekend.

Not only that, I'll be scanning the cartoons in from the syndication sheets, so you'll be able to see Roger's fantastic artwork in all the clarity it deserves, rather than in the primitive blurry colour that was the best newspapers could manage at the time.

I'll also be posting some of the original scripts and outtakes that never made it to publication. There will be a lot of those in the first couple of weeks - my ideas for the first week of the strip and those of the Editor differed wildly...

The clarion call

Actually, with my two cats, the sound that can be heard through twelve feet of solid concrete is the opening of a carton of Whiskas chicken'n'cheese cat treats. Or the sound of someone picking up a carton of Whiskas cat treats. Or moving towards a carton of Whiskas cat treats. Or just being in the same hemisphere as a carton of Whiskas cat treats. They quite like Whiskas cat treats. If those nice people from Waltham foods would like to send me a big box you'll find the email address on my profile page. Whiskas cat treats. Mmmmm.

Q: Are we not men? A: No, we are rabbits

That must hurt. They're pretty big ears. I couldn't resist contrasting the happy bunnies of St Helen's Park with our resident grim lop, Scrumpy.

Wabbits!

Another useful filter - the four colour screen one - is used in the first panel. It gives the frame that over-bright underground comix feel that I think conveys a catnip trip effectively.

One of my favourite bits of St Helen's Park is the De Roemer Fields. Walk to the top of the Park just before dusk and hop over the stile, and there you will will find a magnificent view over the down, looking southeast over the park, Hastings, St Leonards and then, ultimately, the sea glinting in the background. And in the foreground you will find an acre of little brown rabbits sharing a steely sloping grassy meadow with a couple of placid ponies. If I've had a frustrating day at work I find bunny therapy to be most therapeutic at the end of the day...

Pointillism

I try not to use Photoshop filters - but sometimes they can be so useful. Here's what happens if you take a radial full spectrum gradient and apply the pointillism filter to it.

The inevitability of mud in the mind of the cartoonist

Maybe using getting covered in mud as a punchline three times in two months is a bit too frequent. Or maybe I could rebrand it as a running joke - this is the third and final time I'll use it. For a bit...

Tree!

Not happy with this one. I wanted to show Jones entangled in a tree, dragging it along, but for reasons of space I had to replace it with something more upright. Here she seems to have become host to some new form of parasitic shrub. I'll be interested to see the comments from the readers that don't check out the blog to see what they make of it...

Rinkidinkidinkidinki!

Am I the only person on earth that hears 'rinki dinki dinki dinki' when cats shake their wet paws dry? Let's find out...

I'm especially proud of the first two panels of the cats wading over the stream. Sadly, I had to lose the backgrounds in the last two frames to give clarity to the shaken off water.

Wildlife

Hold on a minute... where have all the woods gone?

Fear not, this is not a mistake on my part. It's quite deliberate. I wanted a plain background in order to be able to show the assorted flying beasties clearly. And my rationale is that St Helens' Park is a series of woodlands and meadows - so Smith and Jones have merely reached one of the clearings.

So you can follow this trek on the map like Watership Down or The Lord of the Rings, Smith and Jones live a couple of hundred yards south of the bottom of the map and entered the woods at St Helen's Avenue. They're working their way north and will eventually reach the De Roemer Fields to the north.

Anyone who's been to Scotland in the summer will know midges. They'll also know that I've somewhat underexaggerated the problem

Nettles

I once had a Canadian girlfriend - the one who owned Scrumpy Jack. I was quote surprised to discover that she'd never come across nettles before - I thought they were pretty widespread in any temperate climate, but they obviously never got as far as Ontario. She found out about them pretty rapidly one day while walking in the countryside. There's a reason why I never walk through the woods in shorts.

Nettles aren't poisonous, they're just irritating. Nettle rash is perfectly bearable, and can be dealt with in the field by applying a few dock leaves to the irritated area. Dock plants quite usefully tend to grow right next to nettles - if you're looking for evidence that God is an Englishman there is it right there. You can also make tea out of nettles - more evidence!

Snap!

I'm having a good month for expressions. I think I've got Jones's innocence and Smith's annoyance just right in frame four. The colouring for these woody backgrounds takes forever, though.

Backgrounds

This month's story arc has been a bit of a challenge for me. It's all set in woodlands, and it's not a natural sort of setting for me to draw. The main thing I'm trying to get over is the density of the vegetation and the overgrown undergrowth. The biggest task for me has been to try to keep the woods I draw from looking mechanical. It's so easy for a cartoonist to come up with a glyph that conveys the idea of 'tree' and then reproduce it over and over again. Hopefully I've succeeded in giving the woods a properly organic look while still keeping everything in my style.

If you want to see someone who is a master at this sort of thing, take a look at Little Dog Lost by Steve Boreman. I'm quite in awe of the countryside he draws.

Note the concept of cartoon shorthand and glyphs - I'll be returning to that in a month or so.

Michael

I was wandering through the Garden District of New Orleans a few years ago. It's a long story how I got there, involving the SuperDome, an all-woman barbershop choir from Surrey and some marital infidelity by my sister. Anyway, there I was, fresh off the streetcar, taking a constitutional through Anne Rice's Vampire Grand Central. It's an area full of grand plantation owner's mansions in private grounds, a lot of which are now consulates.

There a was a lot of woofing going on in one of the gardens. I peered through the cast iron railing into the garden the woofing was coming from, and what I saw has now been reproduced in the cartoon above, except not quite as grand and steamy. A tethered German Shepherd was being driven mad trying to reach a large black cat who was insolently sitting on his haunches, staring at him and looking completely unpeterbed. After a few minutes, the cat decided it had tormented the dog enough and calmly stood up and stalked off back to the road. He allowed me to greet him and accepted a few scratches behind the ear and strokes, and then walked off to the other side of the road, where he greeted someone else. That was when I learned he was called Michael, and he was a well known character around those parts. No-one knew who owned him, but this was his neighbourhood and as one of his friends I was welcome here.

One day Michael's going to get a book written about him.

Expression

Sometimes I get an expression just right. It doesn't happen often. But I'm proud of Jones in frame three.

The real Smudge is superior to me

Here she is doing that looming superiority thing that she keeps on doing to Smith in the strips, while I'm trying to concentrate on my colouring.

The woods

As I write this Gizmo is perched on the windowsill of my study, staring out at the sun as it slowly lowers itself over the woods to the northwest. The view out is much as you see in frame two - a few layers of roofs make their way up the down, and then, after that, there is St Helen's Park, a big gap in the middle of Hastings full of trees and meadows. It's time for Smith and Jones to explore the wildness that lays just a few yards away from their front door...