Saturday 30 June 2012

Millie Week 43, Mon 1 - Sat 6 July 1991

I'd very rarely have to bat when I was playing cricket at school. I was definitely a 'tail-end Charlie', and a very reluctant batter. My aim would be to get myself out as quickly as possible without causing injury to myself or anyone else.

I was parodying all those Empire-era school stories I used to read when I was a child. You know the ones - Blenkinsop Minor, the brilliant but penniless scholarship boy in the first form, doing his best to fit in with the others at Bluefriars school in his hand-me-down uniform but never quite succeeding until the day he finds himself at bat, facing the son of Lord Squittington at the very end of a hard and bitterly fought house cricket match between Slytherin and Griffindor. Or something like that. He needs one run to draw, two to win. The ball is hurled at him, he flexes his arms, the bat describes a graceful arc through the languid summer air and connects with the ball with a heathy thwack. The ball is found the following day, somewhere in the next county, and Blenkinsop Minor is a hero, finally accepted as a good egg by the entire school, apart from the bitter and scheming heir to the Squittington millions... Etc.

This is very much my take on that sort of situation. It may not be cricket, but then what is?

For those that don't know the rules of cricket, I'd better explain what Millie does in the fifth strip. She effectively commits cricket suicide by knocking the bales off the wicket. Normally that should be done by the other team, but it's perfectly possible to make yourself out by accidentally knocking your own bales off. I know I've done it before, simply by not looking where my bat was going when preparing to wallop a ball hurled in my direction.

Friday 29 June 2012

The one Gizmo projectile vomited over.

You think you've got critics - I have a cat that vomits over the strips that he doesn't like! I made the mistake of leaving the book that I draw these strips in open on the floor in the study (I draw on the floor - a habit I've never got out of since I drew cartoons as a kid) and then going out of the house. I also made the mistake of not hanging up my jacket and leaving it on the back of my office chair. Then I fed Gizmo and left the house for an hour.

When I came back I found that Gizmo had decided to bolt his food, then sit on the back of my chair. Then he exploded. There was pureed cat food all over the carpet, the chair, my jacket, and the cartoon book. Blee!

The jacket's survived, thanks to some nifty work by the dry cleaners, though I shall treasure forever the look of horror on the face of the counter assistant when I first produced the jacket, explaining that my cat was possessed by demons. The carpet has a nasty stain and needs cleaning. The worst of the blee was scraped off the cartoon - thankfully I don't use water based inks - and some photoshop work got rid of the rest. The final result is above - while an initial scan of what I had to work with is below.

Cartoon nerds will also note the use of photo-blue pencil to make the initial sketches, and the fact that I actually paste in archy's typewritten dialogue rather than add it in post-production.


Gizmo - biding his time....

Monday 25 June 2012

The return of archy

You can work out what archy meant to type by consulting a computer keyboard and substituting each character for the one directly to the right. The keyboard this was worked out on was an Apple bluetooth one - Windows machines may not have all their keys in the same position.

Saturday 23 June 2012

Millie Week 42, Mon 24 - Sat 29 June 1991


This was me poking fun at the kind of people who take sports deadly seriously. I never saw the point of it at school and that attitude has carried over into adult life. We won the game - that's nice - but it doesn't actually mean anything does it? I like to annoy sports obsessives by referring to their precious games and kickball and hitball - as Maisie used to do in The Perishers.

Friday 22 June 2012

Grabbers

More seafront amusements - this one based on the arcade on The Stade, facing the London Trader pub. It's fronted by a series of penny-in-the-slot machines, chock full of licensed soft toys that are just that smidgen too small to be held properly by the mechanical claws that are supposed to deliver your prize to you. I pass this place every time I collect some fish and chips from the Lifeboat, Hastings best chippy, and the idea came to me when I saw that one of the machines was full of Hello Kittys. I changed it to Garfield, as he's just as heavily merchandised but means more to me than any of Sanrio's kawaii menagerie of creatures.

Personally, I'm addicted to the 2p cascades inside the arcade. They fascinate me. I have a jar full of tuppennies on my desk, which I collect specially to use on those machines. I never win anything worthwhile on them - it's just fascinating to see the coins pile up and then tumble - it's like an engineering puzzle, and quite hypnotic.

Wednesday 20 June 2012

Swan Lake

Back to the swan boating lake on the seafront. This isn't the first time humans have appeared in the strip - that momentous occasion was a couple of weeks back, the first time we visited this location, and before that we had some people in cars and buses a year ago. You'll see some more in a month's time. However, one thing I'm determined to do is only use people as set dressing. Smith and Jones won't interact directly with people in the strip. If ever they do, as with the humans they share a house with, it all takes place quite deliberately off-frame.

However, I've indulged myself with a pretty idealised portrait of Linda and I in the boat to the far left of the frame.

Monday 18 June 2012

Pching Pching Pching!

This is me experimenting with the colours. Rather than using my usual muted palette, I thought that while I was on the seafront I'd use something a bit stronger. This is an attempt to reproduce the richly saturated reds and crimsons of a seaside amusements arcade - in particular the interior of the slot machine arcade on Pelham Parade. It's quite horrid, the colours clash and it's migraine inducing - so I think I captured the ambiance of the place pretty well.

Saturday 16 June 2012

Millie Week 41, Mon 17 - Sat 22 June 1991


Something strange happened to the colouring in Monday's strip. Keith suddenly turned black for a week. I can see why it happened - at the time the West Indies bowlers were the most feared in the world so it was natural that the Mirror's colourist would paint him brown. But only two months beforehand he'd been a pasty white punk destroying the stage in the youth club. He returned to his normal colouring after I phoned to complain.

A few neat touches in the following day's strip. The massed ambulances next to the pavilion in the first frame. And anyone who has an old fashioned pav in their school grounds will recognise the ambience of the interior Roger's distilled into a few simple lines in the second frame. Every pavilion in the country must have the same battered old table in the middle of the room as its single piece of furniture.

y666666666t. (Sorry, Gizmo just made a comment with his paw there.)

Millie's in my usual fielding position, long on (or long off, its equivalent on the other side of the pitch, in the next county). The only exercise I used to get playing cricket was running from one side of the pitch to the other once every six balls.

Friday 15 June 2012

Nap attack!

Yes, it's the real Smudge! I've been trying to get a photo of her asleep in this position for ages but up to now she's always woken up as soon as she hears a camera approaching.

Deckchair

I considered entering Hastings' design-a-deckchair competition last year. My idea was to have a normal striped deckchair, but to have a picture of Smith printed on the seat, curled up, and looking up with a single eye, thinking "Do you mind? This is MY chair!".

Can I also say that deckchairs aren't just difficult to put up - they're a pig to draw as well!

Wednesday 13 June 2012

Boing!

The trampolines on Hastings seafront, next to the beach volleyball court and behind the Pirate Adventure Golf course. And my little tribute to the film A Hard Days Night.

Monday 11 June 2012

Splash!

It's that time of the year again. Welcome to Hastings seafront. This year we'll be nosing around some of the other attractions along the prom, not just the beach. But first of all, let's give Smith and Jones a reason not to stay on the shore...

Saturday 9 June 2012

Millie Week 40, Mon 10 - Sat 15 June 1991


When I was a kid I used to read Peanuts religiously. It all made sense to me, apart from one thing. What was that game that involved standing on semicircles in big hats and one oversized glove that Charlie Brown was no good at? I'd never come across it before. What was a shortstop (and do dogs normally play in that position)? What was the significance of sliding? How does one load a base? It was totally baffling.

So, once I had my own cartoon strip, handled in the States by King Features, I decided to have my revenge, with this month-long storyline about cricket, specifically written to confuse Americans.

However, it went down very well in my other main market, India and Pakistan. Yes, Millie was seen in the sub continent at the time. To be honest it was pirated, along with all the other strips in the Daily Mirror. I never saw a penny of royalties from all the papers that printed smudgy versions of strips that had been run in the Mirror a few days before and then got photocopied and faxed to Bangalore or wherever. But I sort of felt flattered that someone would bother.

There's an irony behind that first strip. England hadn't been having a very good time of it that summer, but on the day that strip came out England won its first test match against the West Indies for about ten years. It's a frightening power I have there - I promise only to use it for good.

Wednesday's strip is based on personal experience. The First XI cricket pitch was considered to be sacred ground by some of the teachers in my school, even when it was a muddy patch of ground four months out of season in the middle of the winter. I still remember being shouted at for walking across this nondescript patch of grass in rugby boots during one interminable games afternoon. "ARE YOU SOME KIND OF IDIOT, PILCHER?". No, I'm not the one getting angry about using some waterlogged turf as a short cut to a rugby game I don't want to participate in. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

I have no idea what the apparatus in the first frame of strip four is called, but it's made out of curved wooden slats and is used in fielding practice, especially for those fielding close to the batsman. A ball gets thrown into the thing and the curves and slats randomises how it comes out again, so you need very quick reflexes to catch the ball as it whizzes out again.

Number 11 was my usual position in the batting order. It was a good place to be - if your team was winning you had little fear of having to bat, you could just sit on a grassy bank and watch the game progress very slowly. Of course, you still had to field for half the afternoon, but if you were in the outfield there was little chance of the ball every coming anywhere near you. Lucy from Peanuts was the model for my fielding style. I never caught a single ball in my entire school fielding career.

In the final strip Millie is facing Sammi in the nets - another bit of cricket training equipment, essentially a single wicket in a net box so bowlers and batters can practice without having to spend most of their time retrieving their balls from the far distance.

Friday 8 June 2012

Basset

Maybe I'm being a bit unfair - he's only been going for 50 years, but he seems to have spent the last 40 of them stuck in the 1970s. I suppose that's one solution to the question of why cartoon characters never seem to age - in Fred Basset land it's perpetually 1973.

Wednesday 6 June 2012

Bunting

It's all over. We're all back at work now, stuffed to the gills with Jubilee cupcakes. The bunting remains for a couple of months until we get to reuse it for the Olympic celebrations.

Monday 4 June 2012

God bless you, Ma'am, etc

It's Day Three of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. We've had the day with the horses and the day with the boats, today is the day of the concert in the Mall, and tomorrow is the day of Deep and Significant Ceremony.

I'm taking the point of view of a different species here - what the cats say is not necessarily my own view. In fact, this time round, I'm surprisingly quite into the Jubilee, as is the rest of the country. The Golden Jubilee ten years ago was quite another matter - the monarchy was still suffering from its post Diana comedown and the Queens children still had the power to embarrass. Everyone tried to ignore the coming festivities until the actual day came around and then suddenly, we realised that despite everything, we still secretly loved having a Queen.

Ten years on, we're reconciled to Charles finally being married to a woman he actually loves; Wills is waiting in the wings with his own very popular queen-to-be (and arse-riffic sister-in-law); the Duke of Edinburgh is insulting all and sundry and the Queen stands at the head of it all, serene in her sensible shoes. It's a ridiculous institution and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Incidentally, by law the Queen owns Dave the Swan. Something to do with both being personifications of grace and majesty I suppose...

Saturday 2 June 2012

Millie Week 39, Mon 3 - Sat 8 June 1991


A final week of bike related gags. I think I'd just had my first bike nicked from the car park at Trinity Theatre in Tunbridge Wells - it disappeared while I was on stage in a documentary play which was supposed to rehabilitate the reputation of gypsies. All that remained was a neatly severed bike lock. When I got my replacement bike I was much more careful about locking it up; Millie's precautions are only a slight exaggeration.

Friday 1 June 2012

Ride a white swan

Here we are at the boating pond on Hastings seafront. I don't think this is what Marc Bolan meant when he wrote his seminal hippy boogie back in 1970, but who knows, stranger things have happened. Debussy wrote his gorgeous tone poem La Mer while he was staying next door at Eastbourne and staring at the grey English Channel from his hotel room, so maybe the diminutive glam pixie came up with the idea for 'Ride a white swan' after seeing our swan shaped pedalos. One mad art project I know they have inspired is this one...