Pinkfish and cartoon science

There's been a lot of speculation about the kind of dye that Jones was covered in. Well, let me put your minds at rest. It's a special pink cartoon dye that only comes off in contact with pond water. Cartoon chemistry is like cartoon physics - it doesn't work in quite the same way as it does in the real world. We've already discussed the way that gravity only acts on a coyote two eye-blinks after becoming aware of walking off the edge of a cliff. Another example is that if a dog and a man in a green shirt encounter a ghost in a creepy room, that room will immediately elongate so that the dog and man and flee the ghost for thirty seconds without ever leaving the room. A side effect of this is that a series of identical light fittings will appear at regular intervals along said room.

Millie Week 9 Thu 1 - Sat 3 November 1990

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As tends to happen with Smith, Halloween merges seamlessly into Bonfire season.

The monster firework that Sammi brings out in the second strip was called "The Big Sadaam Multi-Megaton Big Bang Exocet Purple Screamer". Operation Desert Storm was a very recent memory so it was changed to something a little less contentious. This was probably a good thing, if it had been printed with the original name it would probably have been used by Tony Blair a decade later as evidence that Iraq had WMDs.

Millie Week 9 Mon 29 - Wed 31 October 1990

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The first strip may be familiar to people who read Smith on GoComics around this time last year. Yes, it is a recycled gag, but it's been recycled more times than you would think. It's actually a gag that I wrote in 1981, then reused in Millie in 1990, and then returned to its original characters in 2010. Expect to see it again around 2021. In 3D, probably.

Strip two is another old Smith gag (one I haven't reused) with the set up changed significantly but the punchline remaining the same.

Trick or treating was pretty rare in the UK in 1990 - it really only entered British consciousness in 1982 when ET came out. Mass produced Halloween costumes and seasonal sweets have only started appearing in supermarkets over the past three years or so. That's why it was decided to spell out exactly what was going on in the last frame - even now people are a bit hazy about the rules, so imagine what it was like 21 years ago.

I've been party to a Facebook discussion today where a friend of mine at stage school was debating her Halloween costume - should she be a Dead Tinkerbell or a Dead Wonder Woman? I think she's now been persuaded that she doesn't have to be a dead anything - so if you're in London and Princess Belle from Beauty and the Beast turns up at your door on Monday, say Hi to Lucy for me.

Here's the Smith version of strip 1...

Thought so...

Jones returns to her normal colour next week.

Kebabs

The truth about those fuzzy pencil cases is that they're actually the skins of strange Turkish creatures with no internal organs whatsoever, called Doner Kebabs. They've been hunted almost to extinction now, and those sweating cylinders of meat that you see in kebab shops nowadays have to be made of reconstituted lamb. But in the old days they were easy hunting, all you needed was a skewer and you could feed a small market town full of violent drunks for an entire night with one.

Glow in the dark

Dedicated to anyone who has to struggle with cats on the bed at night.

Millie Week 8 Thu 25 - Sat 27 1990

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New character alert - and this one's a keeper. Called Dave in the original scripts and then changed to Duane, as can be seen by the slightly different handwriting where the new name has been inserted. It was probably my change, my shallow babe magnet characters tend to be called Wayne or Duane.

UPDATE: SUNDAY AFTERNOON

Show's over. Normal service can now be resumed. And if you missed the Hastleons production of the Sound of Music you've only got yourself to blame/thank (depending on your opinion of The Sound of Music). In my opinion it was an excellent production of a show that really needs to be put out to pasture now.

Anyway, back to The Magic Shoebox, Crippen Comprehensive's winter show. Duane's fall off the stairs is something I know well, being very short sighted and, until I bought a pair of prescription round spectacles that fit all time periods, occasionally required to act without my glasses. Don't even bring up the subject of contacts... the very idea makes me shiver. Most people remember The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which, as Dr Caius, I had to threaten someone with a Rapier and have a short mock fencing battle with my faithful assistant, Rugby. I'm doing this effectively blind. And then I fall off the stage during a dress rehearsal. For the rest of the run, poor Rugby was sweating cobs as I jabbed sharp pointy lengths of metal in front of his nose, with no way to gauge distances apart from guesswork.

How short sighted am I? Very. Without glasses this screen becomes unreadable from six inches away.

British Summer Time ends this year at 2am next Sunday morning - the clocks go back an hour and I have to drive home from work in the dark for five months. By the time we reach Christmas the sun will be setting at 3.45pm. On the plus side - it means we get really good mileage out of our Christmas decorations.

Millie Week 8 Mon 22 - Wed 24 1990

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Not much to say about this one - apart from mentioning that I'm currently in the chorus of The Sound of Music at the White Rock Theatre in Hastings. Tonight is the last night. I've been finding being in the chorus quite refreshing - compared to having a larger part it's very relaxing. All I have to do is turn up, apply make-up, don a tux and then waltz for a bit. Normally I'd spend all my time up to my first entrance pacing the dressing room, chanting my lines and cues to myself like a Buddhist mantra. Instead, I've been backstage for most of it either reading or inking in next month's batch of Smith cartoons.

The show, incidentally, is excellent. If you're in the Hastings areas, why not come and see it? I've noted in previous blog entries how much I don't like the Sound of Music as a script, but this is a production that transcends its raw material - and the sickly sweetness is kept to a minimum.

Retrofitting

It was 1981 when I first drew this series of cartoons. Punk was a recent memory and dayglo was still high street fashion (see Fiorrucci, early editions of i-D, Camden and Kensington markets, and the works of X-Ray Specs). In the original I ended the strip with the second frame - that was a good enough punchline for then, and there were enough leftover punks* littering the streets of Tunbridge Wells for it still to be funny. Things have moved on since, and now it is mainstream to be artificial - hence the addition of the third frame.

Here's the original... The part of Smudge is here played by Perdi - the Smudge in the cartoons took on a lot of her characteristics, including the wall fixation. Note self-conscious teenage lettering, and the wandering white nose patch on Perdi.

Race for the punchline...

If someone on the comments section at GoComics doesn't get to this punchline before this gets published I shall be very surprised!

Fashion

Drawn by someone who tends to buy clothes cheap just as they've fallen out of fashion and then only throws them away just as tiresome teeter-totter of trend falls back in line with what I've bought. I'm all for looking smart, but I have no time for worrying about the exact width of my lapels this week.

And don't get me started on Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister. What is the point of buying clothes there when you can get exactly the same stuff for a tenth of the price in Wal-Mart? - only without the advertising all over the front, and in a shop with proper lighting.

Millie Week 7 Thu 18 - Sat 20 2011

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Jeremy James Anthony Gibson Beadle was one of those Marmite people - you either loved him or you hated him. I was one of those that loved him. If you only knew him for the practical jokes  he played on the public on ITV, you probably hated him. But there was a lot more to him than that. I never tended to watch his ITV shows, but listened to him avidly on the radio, where his other side as an English version of Robert Ripley of 'Believe it or Not' fame would hold sway. The man was a bit of a polymath on the quiet, (he styled himself 'Curator of Oddities') and was also a great fundraiser for an assortment of charities, for which he received an OBE. Lazy comedians looking for an easy laugh would always pick on him, though, not only for the TV shows, but for his withered hand, a disability he'd had since birth. He became one of those people you were supposed to hate because everyone else appeared to. He died three years ago, and the obituaries showed that he was secretly held in a lot more affection than anyone ever dared suppose.

Frame one, strip three: The Woolwich Building Society. We're still drawing real Catford at this point. Ironically for a building society, the Woolwich no longer has any buildings of its own - it was taken over by Barclays in the great financial feeding frenzy that helped tip the economy over the edge. Woolwich in South London is also where my Dad's side of the family came from. My roots are on the Woolwich ferry.

Millie Week 7 Mon 15 - Wed 17 2011

I hate learning lines. Some people are able to scan a script once and be word perfect ten minutes later. I've actually seen this happen, when in a production of A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Past fell ill on the last night. Amazingly, a friend who had turned up to see the show that night locked himself in the green room, learned his part, and played the part perfectly less than an hour later. Tim Boorman, wherever you are now, you're a marvel.

I'm not like him. It takes a good week of pacing in circles and mumbling to myself before my lines sink in. Especially if they're lines I've written for myself.

Pink!

This and the following couple of weeks of strips are based on some old ones I did in 1981. I've held the remix of this storyline until now so it can coincide with America's National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Last year at this time, this happened. Even if it doesn't happen again this year, why not donate? And in the interests of balance, as some people complain that breast cancer is a glamorous cancer that gets all the attention, why not visit here as well, to find out about something that affects men even more than breast cancer affects women. And then enjoy the next few strips, which won't mention cancer at all...

Hoick, hoick, hoick!

This is why I don't trust herbalists. I'm sure cats do throw up grass outdoors as well as on the carpet, but I've never seen any evidence of it.

More vets

This is what I've been working up to for the past week. This entire run was based on the real Smudge's last trip to the vets. She's an old lady now and we're worried about her joints - she'd started to get a lot stiffer than a cat has any right to be. So we took her to the vets. The vet decided to try a few tests on her, and took her into a cubicle to see if she could take a blood sample. A few minutes later, she returned with Smudge, and some blood, none of it Smudge's. "I think she's feeling a lot better than she's letting on" she said. Smudge is on anti inflammatory drugs now and is doing a lot better.

Millie Week 6; Thu 11 - Sat 13 Oct 1990

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Three things to note about the second strip. The boy with the blonde hair is apparently called Tim, and I flag him up in the script as someone who will feature later. We never see him again.

Similarly, the boy on top of the pyramid in the second frame is Sammi's little brother. I think we see him in the background in strips set at Sammi's family newsagent's, but once again he never becomes a main character.

Finally, from the original script, here are my drawing instructions for the third frame...

3. I'll leave this up to Roger's imagination, but I think two people formed the sides of the toast while the others were beans last time I was subjected to this.

Millie Week 6; Mon 8 - Wed 10 Oct 1990

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This is interesting - the first strip you see here on the syndication sheet is not the one that got published - and I've only just noticed. The Mirror changed it to one that had exactly the same script and the same punchline, but took place in a busy street on the way to school. It ends with Richard spouting his Shakespeare to some puzzled passers-by. And it's a definite improvement on the original. I'll scan it and plonk it in this post later.

The character of Miss Twee was partly based on the wonderful Diana Edwardes, the driving force behind the West Kent Youth Theatre, and one of Those People Who Change Your Life For The Better; though Diana was neither twee nor as theatrical as this. I'm not convinced she would have had much time for drama workshops either. Neither did I, I always found them to be a nice way to waste an afternoon but I could never take them seriously. Acting is a mixture of let's pretend, empathy, diction and knowing where you are on a stage in relation to other people. Pretending to be an acorn doesn't come in to it.

Added, Saturday afternoon: Here's that revised Monday strip...

Some questions just shouldn't be asked.

Hiding

A strip for anyone who has ever tried to get a cat into a basket that does not want to go. It's not a problem that I've had with Smudge, as the cat basket usually lives on top of the wardrobe with it's door left open so that she can use it as a refuge from Gizmo when he gets a bit too lively for her. Gizmo, on the other hand, is able to brace himself against the door of the basket with all four paws and his tail, and can only be coaxed into the basket by laying a trail of his favourite Whiskas crunchy treats.

Thermometer

..and the moral of today's strip is 'never share a thermometer with a cat'.

Millie Week 5, 4-6 Oct 1990

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Strip 1: Soundtrack: Kylie. If you live on planet Earth you know that one.

Strip 2: Soundtrack: 'Where are you Baby' by Betty Boo. If the main art of dance music is in choosing the best samples, she chose the best. In particular she applied the hook from 'Captain of Your Ship' into her song better than Reparta and the Delrons did in the original.

Strip three got pulled apart at the eleventh hour just before publication. You'll notice that the handwriting changes in the last speech balloon. The original words in the speech balloon were "It's like trying to share a house with Jodrell Bank around here..." (Jodrell Bank is a radio telescope just outside Manchester, once the largest in the world - in other words a big dish hoovering up sound like Richard in frame 2) It was deemed better by the Mirror to underline the subtext to the cartoon in big black marker pen rather than just allude to it. I think it killed whatever joke that was lurking in there stone dead.

Oh - and I have no idea where 'Dracular' came from. It's Dracula in my original script.

Millie week 5 pt 1, Oct 1-3 1990

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Twenty years ago the idea of the first window display of Christmas happening at the beginning of October was still an exaggeration. Now we're in an age of all year round hot cross buns and my coffee table is groaning under the weight of the Christmas catalogues that have already arrived. The Xmas puds sit arranged in serried rows in Sainsburys.

Can you guess what the big pop culture event of 1990 was? A few months later I was to share the comics page of the Daily Mirror with them...

The second cartoon heralds that Autumn's big storyline - one that if repeated nowadays would be considered a rip-off of Disney's High School Musical. Yes, Crippen comprehensive is doing a school play - and it's a self penned musical...

I'll admit it. I do musicals. I toured around Kent with the West Kent Youth Theatre while I was at school, doing shows like "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" (Bud Frump) and "Cabaret" (Chorus - too much dancing and sex appeal required for a real part), so I know of what I speak here. I still appear in them now.

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Here's what I'm currently doing. In this case I'm in the chorus again, but that's mainly because The Sound of Music is like a compendium of everything I hate in musicals (sickly sentimentality, glutinous songs you hate but can't get out of your head, ponderous plotting, but thankfully no 'interpretive ballet' that lasts three hours), so I'm limiting my exposure to it. If you like the Sound of Music, come and see the show if you're around Hastings between the 19th and 22nd of October - Hastleons productions are always excellent. If you don't like the Sound of Music, then keep away - it's the Sound of Music.

My idea of a good musical? 'The Full Monty', 'How to Succeed..', 'City of Angels' - something with content as well as tunes, a sense of mischief, and with sentimentality kept to a minimum.