Miaow!

Originally published 4 October 2010

Happy Hogmanay!

This was the strip that launched the cat flap. We won’t get to see the entire cat flap saga here, before the strip starts up again, but take a look at GoComics and scroll back to 4 October to read the entire story in the right order

Another Brick in the Wall Part Two

Originally published 19 November 2010

The question I set the readers when this first came out was ‘how many other well known LP covers can you see in this strip’? There are a few red herrings, but there are definitely four recognisable ones, and two obscured ones. Answers below. Wipe over the following space to reveal them

Frame 1: Beatles, Sgt Pepper (under Smith’s rear paws)
Paul Simon: Graceland (under Sgt Pepper)
Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon (under Smith’s front paws)
Frame 2: Beatles: With the Beatles (UK edition) (in front of Smith)
Pet Shop Boys: Introspective (under With the Beatles)
Mike Oldfield: Tubular Bells (under Smith’s tail)

Incidentally, I think The Wall is the most overrated album ever recorded. I think I can only take one side of Roger Walter’s whinefest at a time, and there are four ruddy sides of his passive aggressive self pity to wade through. If you’ve never heard it, don’t bother. Like most of the works of Frank Zappa, the idea of it is much better than the reality.

3am

This happens every night in the Pilcher household. Billy and Bella still retain their standoffishness during the day, refusing to be picked up and spurning outstretched hands of welcome, but at night it all changes. At 2 or 3 in the mining both cats will leap on to the bed, purring the heads off, and demanding our attention. We’ve learned the best way to deal with it is to sleep with one arm outside the bedclothes, then we can pet them as demanded, with the minimum of disturbance. I swear Linda’s worked out how to scratch Billy’s head and still keep sleeping!

Sleeveface

Originally published 17 November 2010

This is like a memorial to a dead internet meme. Does anyone do this any more?

Coney gloom

Originally published 15 November 2010

Back to November for this one, New strips start again on Monday 6th January, so I’m now putting in stand-alones I haven’t run in this blog until then, rather than republishing a storyline that won’t ever get finished. And Scrumpy, the grey rabbit of melancholy, always goes down well.

I'd better get drawing again I suppose...

Vooooooo

Originally published 29 December 2010

This was the first appearance of the Smith vs the Vaccuum Cleaner trope, based on Cholmondeley’s abject terror of our Dyson. In fact the only cat I’ve ever known to be totally undisturbed by vacuums was Smudge. She was a cat you had to vacuum around.

Christmas wrapping

Originally published 27 December 2010

It’s Chrrrriiiiiisssstttmmaaaaaaassssss! A very Merry Christmas / Holidays / Kwanzaa / Festivus / Winterval / Yule / Convenient excuse to get drunk (delete all which do not apply) to you all. And don’t forget to leave the discarded wrapping laying around for your cats to play with.

The Christmas No 1

Originally published 22 December 2010

Don’t worry, Jones won’t be the Christmas Number One. For a start, she’s never appeared on the X Factor, so she’s disqualified already.

I have felt your presents

Originally published 20 December 2010

It’s pointless wrapping presents for cats. Though it can be fun watching them rip into a loosely wrapped catnip mouse.

Going all Philip K Dick on your ass

One for all you comics philosophers out there: if only half a tree appears in a cartoon strip, does the rest of the tree actually exist? Is Smith’s home real or is it just set dressing that is assembled as required for each frame? By extension, how do we actually know the rest of the world beyond our vision is actually there, or is it a simulation assembled as required to give us the illusion of freedom? Happy Christmas.

I’d have some photos for you of Billy and Bella going bonkers in and around our Christmas Tree, but my camera’s run out of battery and I’ve left the charger in the States. (Assuming the States are really there, of course…) Bella’s favourite trick is to remove the tinsel while leaving all the ornaments undisturbed. That and playing with a particularly springy lower branch for hours on end.

Jones o’Lantern

Originally published 29 October 2010

Combining a traditional jack o lantern with cats’ penchant for squeezing themselves into completely unsuitable spaces.

Good meaty nourishment

Originally published 27 October 2010

Another gag recycled from 1981. The original tagline was “Ah yes, Wiskas is good meaty nourishment alright!”, echoing Wiskas’ cat food’s slogan of the time, but it got changed to something less libellous this time around. I’d like to point out that Wiskas does not contain any of the ingredients mentioned, unless theres yet another food labelling scandal pending which we don’t know about yet…

Halloween

Originally published 25 October 2010

How seasonal. This strip was a word perfect redraw of one I originally did in 1981. And I used the gag in a Millie cartoon in the early 90s as well. Where will it turn up next?

Fleas

Originally published 22 October 2010

I’ve skipped a month, as we’re getting near to Christmas. OK, it was an uploading error.

This was actually the closing strip in a sequence about Smith and hedgehog, which he considers to be like a Rubiks Cube for cats.

The hedgehog is, of course, called Martin. This will explain why.

Splat

Originally published 20 September 2010

Growing up around the apple orchards of Kent, I sort of got used to this. In Hastings the equivalent problem is seagulls.

Blackberries

Originally published 17 September 2010

I love blackberrying - I’m lucky enough to have a wood riddled with brambles on my doorstep. In good blackberrying session I can collect several kilos of the things. In fact we still have blackberries in the freezer that I collected last year. The one drawback about blackberries is that if they’re very ripe, they will burst as you try to pick them, and you’ll be left with mauve fingers for a couple of days.

Lost in bed

We have one of those memory foam matresses. My wife loves it - while I’ve grown to accept it over the years. Given the choice, I’d just have a futon and a duvet - nice and simple and hard as a steel plate under a layer of cotton. But that's not going to happen.

Therapy

Originally published 15 September 2010

I know it sounds simplistic, but this is good a way of getting rid of the blues as any. Given the voice between a session with a psychiatrist and a pile of leaves I’d say the pile of leaves wins hands down any day.

Scandinavian Noir

Originally published 13 September 2010

If I wasn’t doing reruns at the moment, I’d be running this strip upside down or playing some sort of practical joke today, what with it being Friday 13th.  But instead we have a Scrumpy strip, professing his love for the terminal gloom of Scandinavian Noir TV.

Actually, he’s referring to the BBC remake of the original Swedish shows, which occasionally break with tradition by having some scenes filmed while the sun is actually out. Another plus is that some of the shows have my old friend Roz Smith (under her stage name of Jessica Lloyd) playing Dr Malmstrom, the police mortician.

Carry on Columbus

Originally published 10 September 2010

I just like the bit of dialogue: “Ha! Superstitious peasant!” With hindsight, it's the little touches like that I like the most.

Way blocked

Originally published 8 September 2010

The internal monologue here is a bit too Snoopy for comfort - sometimes your influences come out a bit too obviously. I try to avoid the cats having solo ‘just pretend’ sessions now, but that doesn’t them getting together in groups every now and again and outvoting me.

Duvet day

Originally published 6 September 2010

Dedicated to the real Smudge, who would never let me change a duvet cover unaided.

Daisyfoot

Originally published 3 September 2010
This has nothing to do with this strip apart from the conjunction of a foot and daisy, but have you ever noticed how much dancers and choreographers  favour odd socks? I’ve spotted this trend a lot lately, doing shows with the Hastleons, where several of the girl dancers favour non-matching legs. The reason is quite simple - it helps to differentiate your left from your right in a visual way, which is a help if it takes even just a split second for your brain to process which direction is your stage right and which is merely your ordinary right. I saw this best exemplified by a choreographer called Emma when she was choreographing a show I was directing. She was a bit of a hippy and would dance barefooted, with a daily between the toes on her right foot. Thus, instead of invoking potentially confusing instructions like ‘to your left’ or ‘to my right’ or ‘stage right’, she would give instruction like ‘lead with your daisyfoot’, which everyone could understand.

Meta

Just playing with the medium.

Cats always land on their feet?

Originally published 1 September 2010

Yes. If they’re allowed to. Setting the template for several other stories over the following couple of years, this sequence ended with Smudge’s wall.

Pdoyyynng

Originally published 30 August 2010

An example of cartoon physics - I’m not sure that Jones would make that much of a difference to be honest. Anyone care to draw a moments diagram showing the forces involved?

Pinging the branch

Originally published 27 August 2010

Occasionally I have nothing to say except this this today’s cartoon. This os one of this days.

This is today’s cartoon.

Ha

Originally published 25 August 2010

This is essentially an old joke wrapped up in new clothes which acknowledge exactly how annoying that old joke was in the first place. Note the ’sound’ effects in the third panel - ROTFL ROTFL. I like doing silly stiff like that.

Cling

Originally published 23 August 2010

Note Smith’s prehensile tail.

You can tell I’m writing these blog entries against the clock before flying off to the States, can’t you? I’ll be flying back today, arriving at Heathrow tomorrow around noon.

n n n n n n n n

Originally published 20 August 2010

There are some stimuli that just can’t be resisted…

The Comet of the Century?

Remember the fuss that was being made about Comet Ison earlier this year? It was going to be the comet of the century. Its tail was going to be so long it would wrap three times around the planet. It was going to cause the end of the world and a plague of frogs. It was going to outshine the moon and be visible during daylight. It was possibly going to very bright. It was going to look not quite so bright but pretty bright nevertheless. It was going to look like a dim hairy star. It was going to look like a big smudge. It was going to be visible to the naked eye. At the time of writing (15 November) it might possibly be visible if you have very strong binoculars, a tripod, and a place to view it from which is at least 100 miles away from the nearest light source.

Nevertheless, lets pretend all that never happened. This strip was inspired by Smudge and Cholmondeley’s reaction to fireworks whenever they saw them through the front room windows. They loved them and tried to paw at them before they fizzled out. This was based on me imagining what their reaction would be to a comet which just hung there in the sky, the way that comets do. Well, the ones that can be bothered to put on a proper show anyway.

Heights

Originally published 18 August 2010

I’m not scared of heights. However, when I’m at the top of something, depths terrify me.

Bush climbing

Originally published 16 August 2010

The start of a new story about cats clubbing trees. This strip, a sort of prelude to the story is actually based on Cholmondeley’s favourite sport, hedge climbing. There was nothing he loved more than to climb a hedge from the inside. He’d dive under the hedge, and then we’d watch the hedge rustle for a few minutes as he navigated his way up the dense thicket of foliage inside. Eventually a head would suddenly emerge from the top of the hedge. Cholmondeley had conquered the hedge.

Now, have you ever tried to retrieve a cat from the middle of a hedge? It’s actually harder than trying to get one out of a tree.

Friday the 13th, Part 1

Originally published 13 August 2010

The first of the Friday 13th gags, where something different is deliberately done wrong to the strip each time. This was a fairly simple deliberate mistake, with the panels placed in the order 3 - 2 - 4 - 1. Later versions would involve image inversions, PhotoShop filters and even animations…

That shirt looks familiar

Originally published 11 August 2010

Yes, it is a Charlie Brown shirt. It could even be his - after all Smith and Jones romp around in the same kind of open-plan Levittown landscape that the Peanuts gang used to in the early strips of the 1950s.

Clumsy

Originally published 6 August 2010

Cholmondeley always was a clumsy cat, so I gave him the same trait in the cartoon. The clumsiness gene was soon passed on to Smith, however, as I concentrated on making Chumley a placid and trusting gentle giant, to contrast with his sister Smudge.

Watch the birdie

Originally published 6 August 2010

A rewrite of an old strip from the 1980s, which had Perdi (Smudge’s predecessor) install one of those old fashioned dome shaped security cameras of the kind that used to be installed in department stores. You don’t see those about any more - or maybe we’ve become so used to them they’ve become invisible, which is a bit of a sobering thought.

“Wonderful chap. All of them.”

Originally published 2 August 2010

Quotation from Brigadier Alexander Lethbridge-Stewart, in the 20th Anniversary special: “The Five Doctors”.

The big day was yesterday, so here’s  my tribute to Doctor Who. Here are all eleven main incarnations so far of the Doctor, interpreted as cats. For the latecomers to the party (hello, America) they are William Hartnell (1963-66), Patrick Troughton (1966-69), Jon Pertwee (1970-74), Tom Baker (1974-81), Peter Davison (1981-84), Colin Baker (1984-86), Sylvester McCoy (1987-89, 1996), Paul McGann (1996), Christopher Eccleston (2005), David Tenant (2005-10), Matt Smith (2010-2013). I’ve not included Pater Capadi as he won’t be the Doctor till Christmas Day. I’ve also left out Peter Cushing’s movie Doctor, Richard E Grant’s animated Doctor, and the Valeyard, a curdled version of future Doctor only ever seen in the Colin Baker story “the Trial of a Time Lord”. John Hurt’s 'War Doctor' has also been left out because at the time of writing (early November) we don’t know where he fits into the Doctors timeline. Is he Doctor 8 towards the end of that incarnation, Doctor 9 before he shaved his head to become Christopher Eccleston, or a hitherto unknown incarnation the Doctor can’t admit to himself ever happened?

The  caricatures I’m happiest with are the ones of Tom Baker (“all teeth and curls” as he used to say), Colin Baker (alien and wonderfully self-satisfied), and Chris Eccleston (“Fantastic!”). And of course, I couldn’t draw Matt Smith without his Fez. He wears a fez now. Fezzes are cool.

The first two Doctors are, of course, in black and white.

GATSO

Originally published 4 August 2010

That’s a Gatso camera you’re looking at there - one of the many speed cameras that infest Britain’s roads. If they actually did their job, reduced speeds and kept the roads are I wouldn’t have problem with them. Unfortunately they only cause cars to slow down in the direct vicinity of a camera, and the sudden braking an encounter with an unexpected camera tends to cause more accidents than the speeding the cameras are supposed to stop. To add to their ineffectiveness, they have to be signposted with warning signs well in advance, and because of austerity cuts, a fair proportion of them are now empty shells with no camera inside.

The word Gatso isn’t an acronym, even though it sounds like one. It’s actually made after its inventor, the Dutch rally driver Maurice Gatsonides, who made the first one so he could measure himself driving round corners and develop the prefect racing line. So they were first developed to help increase vehicle speeds.

Mantelpiece

Originally published 2 August 2010

This is very much based on my own mantelpiece - minus the ugly clock/golfing trophy. Based on Smudge’s ability to thread her way through a crowded mantelpiece without disturbing anything at all, a skill that so far totally eludes Billy and Bella.

It was 50 years ago, today

Originally published 30 July 2010

There are a lot of important 50th anniversaries coming up over the next few days. Tomorrow we commemorate the 50th anniversary of three momentous deaths, President Jack Kennedy, Narnia creator C S Lewis, and writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley. The day after that, Doctor Who celebrates its 50th birthday.

Today, however, as a sort of warm up, we have another one. I am 50 years old today. I’ll be spending most of it travelling. Yes, it’s time for another trip to New Mexico, to spend Thanksgiving with Linda’s folks. It’s not as onerous a trip as you’d think, I genuinely enjoy travelling, and being such a short-arse, I am actually able to fit comfortably into an economy class seat on a transatlantic aircraft.

I’m flying courtesy of those very nice people at Delta, if any of their employees read this and want to give me an upgrade.

For reasons that leave me totally baffled, it’s £100 per person cheaper for us to fly into Albuquerque’s glorious sunport that Lubbock’s bus station of the air. So our itinerary today is Hastings - Heathrow - Atlanta - Albuquerque, Clovis NM.

It’s not too bad. At least my birthday will last 29 hours, instead of the usual 24. And there’s the chance of a really good celebratory Mexican meal at Sadie’s at the far end.

I won’t be out of touch. I’ll be checking my comments regularly on my tablet, and making updates via the comments go GoComics and Facebook. (Look me up under my name - I’m the one in Hastings, Sussex UK, and mention Smith so I recognise you). And I’ll be doing my usual trick of holing myself up in the Java Loft, Clovis, overdosing on caffeine and writing six months of strips while being swallowed up by one of their sofas.

As for the strip? I took a phrase and interpreted it literally. End of story.

Against animal testing

Originally published 28 July 2010

Inspired by watching makeover shows, and makeover features in women’s magazines, and thinking that the subject of the makeover invariably looked better before the experts went to work on them. Honestly, look at a cat’s face and you’re looking at perfection - you can’t improve on that.

Scratch post

Originally published 27 July 2010

Anyone with cats knows what this is all about.

Bin bags

Originally published 26 July 2010

Around this time I was commuting to work by train. Hastings early in the morning is not a pretty sight - those first few hours before the clean-up squads get to work belong to the seagulls, and there’s nothing they enjoy more than tearing apart a bin bag to get at the tasty morsels inside.

The dustbins are a bit of shorthand scene setting - they’re based on the ones Top Cat and his gang used to live in. There are no real dustbins in Hastings, everyone has been forced to use Wheelybins instead, something which explains the preponderance of bin bags and the resulting very fat seagulls in the town.

Shed

Another strip based on a snippet of information from the cat calendar at work. It was of course, accompanied by an image of one of those hairless Sphynx cats.

I’ve noticed Billy and Bella don’t shed as much as Smudge and Cholmondeley used to, but when they do shed it shows up on the carpet so much more because we have light coloured carpets and they have black fur. You can tell where their favourite spots are in the days leading up to a vacuuming...

Pffffffff

Originally published 23 July 2010

The inevitable end to this story. Forensic cartoon style anoraks will note that my rendering of the sea is pure Hergé.

Direction

Originally published 21 July 2010

Maybe if Jones had been facing backwards she’d have more control over that ball. Think about it, in order to go in one direction, Jones would need to be facing the other way. It’s an elementary mistake, but one that Rory in The Barn made as well.

Is this one of mine?

Originally published 19 July 2010

The next three strips were based on ones I originally did in the 1980s. At the time I was just doing the strips for my own pleasure and I didn’t have any qualms about nicking other people’s jokes, after all my audience at the time was just the other people at school. I’ve taken especial care when  reusing these old gags to make sure none of the steals have been repeated.

But in the case of this one, I don’t know if this was a borrowing or not? I know it was based on an old Peanuts cartoon of Snoopy trying to stand on top of a beach ball, and, having succeeded, not being able to get off it again. But something has been nagging at me. I can’t be sure that this development from that simple idea was actually my own. I’ve done extensive research but I can’t find anything similar to this in the work of Schulz or anyone else so I think it’s clean.

If it’s been nicked from anyone else, I apologise profusely. If it hasn’t, enjoy.

(Incidentally since this strip appeared on Comics Sherpa, I’ve seen Rory the lamb in Ralph Hagen’s strip ‘The Barn’ travel around on a beach ball. That makes me feel a bit better.)

Photographic reference

Originally published 16 July 2010

Discouraged by how the previous strip had turned out I went to Hastings beach and took some photos. That led to this, one of my most successful continuous backgrounds. It’s obviously traced over a photograph - this strip involves perspective - something I can normally never be bothered to deal with.

Here’s the photo.

The tall black garden shed things to the extreme left are net shops - structures unique to Hastings. The town never used to have a beach, but when the first groynes (the wooden fences that divide the beach up into sections and help control longshore drift, Smith’s sitting on one in yesterday’s strip) were built in the early 19th century, a tiny bit of beach suddenly appeared, and the fishermen built huts on this new strip of land in which to dry their nets. There wasn’t much room and there were lot of fishermen, each one was only allowed an area of beach of around nine square feet, so the huts went multi-storey. The beach has since grown around the huts but the huts have stayed as they were.

Hastings doesn’t have a harbour, so the boats are launched from the beach, and hauled up and down to the shoreline by tractors.

The cliff is to the proper scale this time.