The Tetrapack offensive

The next month's worth of cartoons show what happens when a thought goes spiralling off in all directions. They may not seem to be related, but they all spun off from the cartoon on 6th January, the one with the coffee jar which sparked off a lot of discussion about the behaviour of blue tits.

The carton Smith is struggling with is called a TetraPak. The man responsible for this package lives in a huge estate near Wadhurst, East Sussex, that I drive past every day on the way to work and is estimated to be the the 83rd richest man on the planet. One day I shall drive up his driveway with a carton of milk, ring his doorbell and challenge him to open one of his own packages, just to see if he can figure out how to do it. But I'm sure he employs a little man in livery specially to open his milk for him.

If this month's batch of strips look a bit different to how they normally appear, that's because I've changed my art materials. I'm now using Fountain Pentels as they give a more varied line. The lettering's done using an italic version of the same pen -it'll take a few strips to get settled again. These strips were also done on the floor in the living room of a house in New Mexico where the only adequate lighting came from the Christmas Tree.

Millie Week 22: Thu 31 Jan - Sat 2 Feb Jan 1991

Millie's credit card gets destroyed before she has the chance to do any damage with it. I think there are nations that wish that had happened twenty years ago too.

Library

Want to have a poke around my library? It's here...

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/SmithCatsonian

Millie Week 22: Mon 28 Wed 30 Jan 1991

Continuing the saga of Millie's credit card.

Richard's final speech in Wednesday's strip was very of its time. I don't think Student loans had been started up at that point, but the Conservatives were about to bring them in. Imagine, Britain was once a country that valued education so much it paid for its citizens to go to university. Now it thinks it's doing a service to leave students in grinding debt as soon as they've grauduated.

The poll tax was one of Margaret Thatcher's madder ideas. It was a flat local tax. Not a flat tax in the way some of the Republicans currently vying for nomination in the US are suggesting, where everyone pays the same percentage of their income in tax. This was a flatter flat tax, in that everyone had to pay the same amount of money - it didn't matter whether you were an impoverished student in a bedsit or a millionaire living on one of your twelve mansions, you paid the same amount. As I said - mad. It was wildly unpopular, as it struck against the British sense of fair play. There were protests, people were imprisoned for refusing to pay, and then riots in Trafalgar Square, and a year later it was replaced with the property based system now, where the amount of local tax you pay is based on the value of the house you live in - not the best of solutions but at least there's some sort of consideration of the ability to pay.

Airing cupboard 9

If nobody gets to the punchline before I do I shall be sooo surprised... However, at the time of writing we're two weeks in, and it still seems to be holding up. If anyone wants a real puzzle to try to work out, watch the last episode of Sherlock and try to figure out how Sherlock survived the fall from the top of Barts hospital...

Airing cupboard 8

This makes my reasons for this storyline even more blatant. Half the strip comprises of white space! If it's any consolation, the colouring of the next month's strips is proving to be a real pig and is taking much longer than it usually does. What goes around comes around...

Airing cupboard 7

I'm pretty amazed by the reaction this series of cartoons had been getting. What I thought was a rather cheap way of buying myself some vacation time by running some Smith-lite strips (in much the same way that Dr Who occasionally has a 'Doctor-lite' episode to make the workload for actor playing the Doctor more reasonable) has turned out to be a real nail biter for some. Now, I don't want to be accused of pricking the bubble of tension that I've inadvertantly created here, but I'd just like to assure everyone that Smith will emerge from the Chilean mine airing cupboard none the worse for wear on Friday. Remember, Smith is a cartoon cat, and cartoon cats run on cartoon biology in much the same way that cartoon road runners and coyotes run on cartoon physics. No cats were hurt during the creation of this strip.

Millie Week 21, Thu 24 - Sat 26 January 1991

Pens on chains are no longer found in banks. Their new natural habitat is the National Lottery stand in Newsagents. However, they are an endangered species, as they are in danger of being swamped by the thousands of tiny biros that escape from Argos branches every day.

Amex are still sending me junk mail. You would think that after twenty two years they would have realised I'm not interested.

If you want to know why Europe's economy is in such a mess, may I refer you the last frame of Saturday's strip. That's why.

Millie Week 21, Mon 21 - Wed 23 January 1991

At around this time I was finding myself doing things like setting up pension plans and preparing to buy my own flat, so I was spending a lot of my time talking to men in shiny suits about things I barely understood. This was my way of getting equal with them.

The 'Hey Yeah' bank account isn't that far off the truth, to be honest. I remember the Nat West offering collectable piggy banks at one point

Airing cupboard 6

OK. Next week is the last week of this...

Airing Cupboard 5

... a bit stringy though.

Airing cupboard 4

This series is actually another redraw of set of cartoons I did as a teenager in 1982. It originally consisted of twelve strips (or two weeks worth, as I had the time to do dailies in those days), but I've shortened it a bit to allow for the current three a week schedule. Some of the more jejeune reflections on society and life have been excised, but this one has survived as I still agree with it.

Millie Week 20, Thu 17 Jan - Sat 19 Jan 1991

Of course I talked to any cats that may have been on my paper route. That was one of the perks of the job. I don't remember any hamsters but there was definitely a man with a ferret on a leash.
I got £2 for my paper round in 1976. Allowing for fifteen years of inflation, £15 seemed fair to me, if you included London Weighting. I have no idea what paper boys and girls get nowadays. I see them occasionally but I think it's a dying tradition. Newspapers now seem to have changed to a voucher subscription scheme where you have to exchange a voucher for a copy at the newsagents yourself.

Millie Week 20, Mon 14 Jan - Wed 16 Jan 1991

Dogs were the bane of my paper round. I never had one attack me, but there was on particular house on Claremont Road with a german shepherd which I swear lay in wait for me on the other side of the door, waiting for me to poke the newspaper through the letterbox. I learned never to poke my hand through, just a couple of inches of newspaper through the door was enough. Then there would be an almighty WOOF, and then the paper would be pulled through the rest of the way by a powerful set of jaws, followed by the sound of shuffling, swearing, ripping and tearing.I'm not sure why that house ever had the paper delivered - it never sounded like enough of it survived to be readable.

Airing Cupboard 3

Airing Cupboard 2

Aha! The master plan is revealed. And I buy myself some time to go on holiday...

Airing Cupboard

This little tribute to Charles Schulz introduces a series of cartoons which could be drawn and coloured really quickly, and which gave me the chance to visit Linda's folks over Christmas. Cartoonists can't go on holiday - if we want to take some time off we have to work twice as hard as usual to create a backlog of cartoons to run while we are away.

However, there isn't much to do in Clovis, New Mexico. I drew February's strips while I was in the States, and will be coloring them overthe next week. I also wrote loads of gags, and now have the strip written until Mid August.

Like a lot of things in my strips, the airing cupboard is based on one from my childhood, with sliding doors and a boiler inside it. It was in my bedroom, and used to terrify me with the strange noises it would make at night.

Millie, Week 19, Thu 10 - Sat 12 Jan 1991

c

Sunday papers were hard work, especially the Sunday Times which was the weight of a telephone directory and fell apart into about 26 different sections. Nowadays, it is even larger, and about three copies will fit into a newspaper boy's bag, but at least News International have the courtesy to shrink wrap the paper now.

Millie, Week 19, Mon 7 - Wed 9 Jan 1991

Click to enlarge

I'm having trouble finding complete syndication sheets for 1991, so for the meantime I'm going back to my scrapbooks. However, this does mean that we have to deal with the discolouration that has happened to the newsprint over the ages. And for the next two weeks, I'm afraid there are some dreadful Gloy gum stains from the cheap and nasty paste that I used to stick the cartoons in with. After that I chucked the Gloy out and used Pritt stick instead.

I was a newspaper delivery boy for about two months in January and February 1976. Two months was about all I could manage - I have never been an early riser and getting up before the sun did was totally alien to my being. My habit of reading the comics in all the papers I was delivering didn't help either.

Being a delivery boy in England is a bit different to being one in the States. I had to stick the paper through the front doors of all the houses on my route. It was in the 'village' area of Tunbridge Wells, mainly old cottages and Victorian houses around a small park called The Grove. There was no way I could just cycle past and throw a paper in the general direction of the front lawn, as there weren't any.

The tabloid in the last frame was meant to be the Sun, at that time a very partisan and populist Conservative paper. The front cover reads 'Neil Kinnock eats babies'. Neil Kinnock was the Labour leader at the time. (To be fair, The Daily Mirror was an equally partisan Labour paper and could be equally childish).

Coffee

Admit it - there's nothing better than being the first one to burst open the seal over a can of coffee.

Smith's not being rude. Blue Tits are birds famed for pecking through the foil caps on bottles of milk after they have been delivered in the morning.

Doomsday

What with the planet's impending doom, economic meltdown in Europe, unrest in Russia and the middle East and another dip in the recession at home, Scrumpy must be in his element at the moment.

2012 ®

I've used the words 2012, London and Olympics in this strip - hopefully the ODA (Olympic Delivery Authority) and LOCOG (The London Organising Committeefor the Olympic Games) won't notice. I may get away with it as I'm not actually selling anything, but woe betide any company that dares to mention the Olympics, however obliquely, in their advertising unless they've paid a kings ransom in sponsorship money.

Advertisers cannot use any two of the following terms together: 'Games', 'Two thousand and twelve', '2012' and 'Twenty twelve'. Neither can they use one of those terms in conjunction with any of: 'Gold', 'Silver', 'Bronze', 'London', 'Medals', 'Sponsors', 'Summer'. Breaking the terms of the Act could result in a £20,000 fine.

So from now on I'm referring to this summer's event as "the Big City in Britain Year After 2011 Every Four Yearly Greek Sports Cluster". (TM)

Millie Week 18; Thu 3 Jan 1991 - Sat 5 Jan 1991

I actually had to do that King Lear essay when I was a kid - that's a word for word transcription.

And Millie's opinions of TS Eliot pretty well mirror my own. I will show you pretentious twaddle in a handful of dust. I deliberately got the title of The Waste Land wrong. No-one complained, which was quite surprising as poetry and the Daily Mirror have a surprisingly close connection. As recently as last year, the Poet Laureate Carol Anne Duffy selected a poem to be printed once a week in the Woman's page, and I can remember Kingsley Amis doing a poetry column while Millie was appearing in the paper. Not what you'd expect from a brash British tabloid, is it?