Gravel

Originally published: Feb 24, 2010

The second in the series of cartoons about surfaces. If you've ever wondered what that series of symbols used in the last frame to express swearing is called, wonder no more. That's a grawlix. The lines around Smith's legs are called blurgits (or swalloops, if you prefer). All the words were coined by Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey) in his book The Lexicon of Comicana. He invented them with his tongue firmly in his cheek, but they've stuck and they're now semi-official words.

Ears

Originally published: Feb 22, 2010

I wish I had ears like a cat. I love watching a seemingly sleeping cat as it monitors every sound that happens around it, ears rotating towards the source of each noise.

Ears are really useful when showing emotion in cats as well. Point them both forwards to express alertness, point them back to show anger or fear, point them in both directions for neutrality, drop them a tad for tiredness, raise them for surprise, have one low one and one high one for dizziness.

Blee!

Originally published: Feb 19, 2010

Never anger a seagull. Never. You can tell the cars of the people in our street who have made that mistake. They're now completely white. Including the windows.

Predate predate

Originally published: Feb 17, 2010

I like the sound effects I've used here: "sneak sneak" and "predate predate", a trick I borrowed from Frank Dickens Bristow. More about that in this post.

This strip has clouds in it. I now tend to keep my skies cloudless because I want to have backgrounds that bring the mainly uncoloured characters into relief, rather than blend in with them.

This is my first gull. Living on the coast, I tend to treat gulls as feathery thugs, the kind that will nick your chips and then shit them all over your car, just because they can. If seagulls ever develop talons, mankind is doomed.

For a more positive cartoon strip about a gull, take a look at Piers bakers delightful Ollie and Quentin.

Surface tension

Originally published: Feb 15, 2010

My cartoon ideas tend to come in themes, and this is the first of a run that considers the different surfaces that cats have to contend with. Gizmo, who was a sort of rescue cat, had git into the habit of keeping his claws out all the time before he came to us. He never got used to the loop pile carpet in our house. You could hear when he was walking around because of the gentle rrrip sound he made whenever he raised a paw.

Zt!

I wish my cats could do this. Instead they rampage around the front room chasing after anything that flutters or buzzes, sending DVD cases, photo frames and ornaments flying. Heaven knows what's going to happen when we get to Daddy Long Legs season in a few weeks time...

Someone's nicked the top half of the tree

We have some rather over enthusiastic tree surgeons here in Hastings. I have a conifer directly opposite my balcony, and I was warned that it was going to be trimmed by the management of our block of flats. Fair enough, I thought, it needs to be thinned down a little bit. What I wasn't expecting to find when I got home one evening was this...

Seagulls now walk along the top of the tree, tormenting Bella with their succulent just-out-of-reachness, and the young tree just behind to the right has since toppled over in the gales earlier this year, providing the tree with a new top.

Purr purr purr

The first sighting of one of the strips preoccupations - the battle between the happy and the professionally miserable. In time this theme would coalesce into the form of the strip's breakout character, Scrumpy the depressed rabbit.

Claws on a blackboard

Jones is probably alone in this one.

I once had a cat, Sunday, that was very particular about the music she would let me listen to. She was normally a very placid cat, but there were two records she detested. One was a re-release of Kraftwerk's first two albums - (there's a link here to the second one for those with a strong stomach) and the other was a budget CD of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos played by a very cheap-to-employ Eastern European orchestra. Maybe there was something about the scratchy, scrapey tone of the playing on the Bach CD or the cacophony of the Kraftwerk LP, but she hated them. I'd know she was annoyed because she'd snort at me, like an angry bull. If I didn't take heed of the warning she'd then gently but very deliberately bite me on the cheek. I'd get the message then - the record would be replaced and peace would be restored.

If you have a more catholic musical taste than Sunday did, might I recommend Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone? It's a podcast that compiles weird and left-field music from his BBC Radio 6 Music show? One moment you could be listening to a Jazz-Punk fusion piece played on stylophones, the next it might be Icelandic folk-funk or library music from public information films. This is what I listen to when I'm writing these blog entries. Which probably explains a lot.

Dignity

The reason why Lolcats are funny but their canine equivalents aren't is all a matter of dignity. Dogs don't really have any, they are so eager to please that they will happily put themselves through all sorts of indignity to please their masters. Cats, on the other hand, won't. So when they are snapped doing something ridiculous it's several times funnier than it would be if they were doing it willingly.

Of course, cats can't actually blush. But they do a good line in washing themselves and ignoring you until you stop laughing at them.

The panel is the floor

Originally published 3 February 2010

One of the advantages of having a side-on drawing style, like everything is happening in front of the side elevation on an architect's drawing, is that the bottom of the panel can double as the floor. It doesn't always work (see panel three, where I've zoomed in a bit) but it's a neat technique to use occasionally. As ever, it's not an original idea - I've borrowed that technique from Herge's earlier stories. Here's a frame from Cigars of the Pharaoh which is a perfect example.

Silhouette

Panel two is a bit of laziness on my part. I think it's one of the few silhouettes I've ever used in this strip, and it's there because drawing the rocking chair in all those positions looked like it was going to be too much like hard work. Nowadays I'd bite the bullet and draw and colour the thing properly, maybe adding a motion blur effect to the brown infill of the chair. I'd also add a floor. It's not always necessary, but in this case Smith needed something physical to land on.

You blockhead, Smith!

Originally published 29 January 2010

The only way this strip could be made more like Peanuts would be to put the cardboard box on a pitcher's mound.

Click Click Click Click

Another gag inpsired by a photo in the Day by Day cat calendar -- this one a backview of some kittens with their tails handing over the edge.

I was fascinated by Newton's Cradles when I was a kid. I never had one but if you were in a shop in Tunbridge Wells in the 1970s and could hear a 'Click click click' sound coming from the gift section, you could pretty well guess that's where I was.

This is an example of why cheating at artwork doesn't work. The idea was that the gag would be helped if the cats stayed in exactly the same position in each frame and only the tails moved, so I drew one frame and then photocopied it another seven times. The result is, frankly, lifeless - compare it with 'Tail Jive' two weeks ago, where every iteration of Smith was drawn individually and it looks much better.

This'll get Snow's attention.

Originally published 27 January 2010

'Big fish, small fish, cardboard box' is a dance, akin to the Birdies Dance or the Macarena in that it goes with its own song, and is especially designed so that anyone, no matter how talentless, can twitch rhythmically along with it. It involves just moving moving your hands, big fish (open your hands wide), little fish (bring them closer together), cardboard box (turn your hands parallel to each other to mimic a cardboard box). The moves originated with rave culture in the late 80s, as it was a dance anyone could do no matter how drug-addled, and has now become a children's party song. Even Bob the Builder does it.

I was experimenting with colours in this strip. Eventually I decided that big bold hues weren't right, and gradually moved towards a more muted palette. An occasional blast of colour is useful, but used as a background like this, it's overpowering.

Smith is coloured the opposite way to most comics. My characters are mainly white, so the colour has to be put into the background. This gives the required contrast and makes Smith and Jones stand out better. The other thing that has to be taken into consideration is that the colours should not clash with Jones's beige points. Hence the muted colours.

Plumpf!

Originally published 25 January 2010

The sibling relation ship in a nutshell. Or cardboard box, if you wish.

Cardboard box

Originally published 22 January 2010

First appearance of cardboard boxes in the strip. Smith, like all cats, loves cardboard boxes, though maybe not as much as Maru, the famous Japanese cat, who prefers to wear his as a cummerbund...

Nyi!

Originally published 20 January 2010

Self explanatory. The summer equivalent to this is sitting in a car with vinyl seats that have been exposed to the sun, in shorts. Nyi!

Frost

Originally published 18 January 2010

This was a direct redraw of one of my original strips from 1982. I'd now consider it as a candidate for animation, with sparkly glittery frost.

Friend

Originally published 15 January 2010

This was where the art went right - Jones is rendered perfectly in the first three frames. There are stock positions the cats tend to be drawn in, sitting, lying down, sleeping, walking etc, and it's good to get away from them now and again. Soon I would work out that I could render Jones fur as a zig-zag rather than a series of disconnected lines, and the problems with the pose in frame four would be solved.

Inevitably...

Right. That's that little fad officially over. Next week: Tail Jive Gangnam Style.*
*Not really.

Bong!

Originally published 13 January 2010

Once again it's obvious the strip hasn't settled into its format yet - the lettering for the sound effects is too fat, Smith's eyelids are drawn in when he's asleep, and what is going on with that lettering in the last panel?

While I'm reposting the first year of Smith, I'll be putting the Saturday postings of Millie on hiatus as well. Millie will return in the new year.

Fierce

Originally published 11 January 2010

Ooooo! Doesn't Jones look fierce in this strip? This is another hangover from the way I used to draw the cats in the 80s - nowadays I don't bother to draw the entire eye and then add lids. Instead I use a technique I've borrowed from Dexter's Laboratory - when Jones gets annoyed her eyes go all horn-rimmed.

Nowadays in this situation I'd draw her with her eyes wide open, anyway. She'd just be playing. Here she seems to have too much intent…

Pummel

This was Cholmondeley's behaviour coming out in the strip. He and Gizmo were great pummellers. Cushions, carpets, people - it was all the same to them - they had to be pummelled into submission.

Not half!

Originally published 5 January 2010

The first comment I ever got for this strip was from someone questioning my use of the phrase 'don't half', a common British usage. "You don't half have some interesting dreams" translates as "You have some very interesting dreams" - or to put it another way, your dreams are not just 50% interesting, they're 100% interesting.

From Webster's:

2 Brit, informal — used to emphasize a statement or description
▪ She doesn't half swear! [=she swears a lot]
▪ It's not half cold today! [=it is very cold today]
▪ “Is it cold out?” “Not half!” [=yes, it is very cold]

Sleep

Originally published 3 January 2010

Gary McKee of Police Limit* has pointed out that one of Smith's USPs is that it's about cats being cats. Their behaviour is entirely consistent with that of cats in the real world.

Well, mostly. You have to ignore the piano playing, unicycling, painting, and surfing the internet to a certain extent, but that sort of thing is allowed in comics. In the main they behave like ordinary domestic cats, and a lot of the strip is inspired by the cats I've shared my life with over the years.

Gary's strip is excellent, by the way - if you've ever wanted to know what the average cop on the corner of the street is thinking, this will show you. It portrays the frustrations of being a police officer in a system that appears to be skewed against ever getting anything worthwhile done. Liberals like me have a tendency to portray those of a more authoritarian bent as unthinking little Hitlers - this strip shows how far off the mark we can be.

The first strip

Originally published 1 January 2010

The story so far…

Smith was my second strip on Comics Sherpa. The first, Riverfields, was about a shopping mall, and it sort of fizzled out as the Credit Crunch hit, and I started to get annoyed with the human characters. After a break of about a year or so, I returned to my drawing board and resurrected some characters I'd drawn when I was at school, Smith and Jones.

It looks bit different doesn't it? As an experiment I drew this strip with an Italic Berol marker. I never used that pen again - the lines were too thick. You'll also notice that Jones has had the pints on her face shaded with black pen - a hangover from the strips I did when I was a kid, when everything had to be black and white. I immediately realised this wasn't necessary - and I could colour in Jones's points afterwards.

To start off with the strip was just Smith and Jones. I know I had other characters to introduce, but I was going to wait till Easter before I started introducing them. First of all Smith and Jones had to be established, with Smith as the dignified one and Jones as the clown forever puncturing his pomposity - a classic double act in other words.

When this site gets redesigned at the end of the year I'll repost all the Riverfields strips in their own section.

Technical note: These early strips are all at 600 pixels across - these date from before the blog so I had no reason to save them at the higher resolution.

Tail Jive, now in colour

Here's the first of the Sundays, and what could be more appropriate than to begin with a redraw of the first Smith strip ever to be published. The version below has been seen before on this blog, it was first published in the 1981 edition of the Skinners school magazine, "the Leopard". I much prefer this redraw, which has overtones of Andy Warhol about it, and a minimum of movement lines. Besides, Smith's learned a few new dance moves over the years...

Millie Week 100: Mon 3 - Sat 8 August 1992

I love Scotland, and I realise I'm giving a completely unfair impression of the friendliness of the natives here. They're very friendly really. And I'm not just saying that because my boss is Glaswegian.

If there's a corner of Scotland I could call my own, it would be the village of Lochranza on the very northern tip of the Isle of Arran. A sea loch, a castle, a distillery, a post office, and more sheep than people, nestled into a glen surrounded by mountains on three sides and the Firth of Clyde on the other - what more could you want? Lochgazza is based on that village.

One of those plot points that you can't get away with any more - the idea that you have to search for somewhere that has a telephone. Cellphones are evil - they destroy fiction.

See you on Sunday...

Actually, the real reason I'm doing this is so I can have some time to prepare a few things.

1) I'm looking into the feasibility of producing some e-books, one for each year of the strip so far. There's a trade off between affordability and image quality which I'm struggling to reconcile - I want to be able to sell an book with about 125 strips in it which will display a reasonable image quality on a tablet computer, and keep it at a price point of £1.99. If all goes well, these will be available in time for the e-book downloading bonanza just after Christmas, when everyone's filling up their shiny new tablets and e-readers.

2) I'll also be preparing a new Smith website, based on the Wordpress framework, with lots more features than Blogger can provide. More news about this as it solidifies. ETA, 1st January 2014.

3) I'll be looking into whether I can produce a printed Smith treasury at all. It would be lovely to produce a book, that would be something permanent. E-books and websites are all very well, but all it takes is one well aimed solar flare or terrorist with an EMP device, and anything dependent on electronic or magnetic storage will be wiped clean in an instant.

(At this point I'd like to welcome my new readers from the NSA and MI5 who will have honed in on the trigger words 'terrorist' and 'EMP device'. Nice to see you.)

4) I also have an idea for a spin-off book. But that'll be kept under wraps for now...

Smith will to his normal Monday, Wednesday and Friday schedule on Monday 6th January 2014. In the meantime, there will be a brand new Sunday strip every, er, Sunday. And for those that missed the first year of the strip, I'll be reposting that on Sherpa, and here on the blog (where it hasn't appeared yet), Monday-Saturday, starting this Monday, the 5th of August. And Millie will continue to appear here on Saturdays.