Big summer storyline starts today...

Thus begins this summer's big story arc. And this one really is a big one - I've just finished scripting it and it's going to go on until well into September.

This is the only way I can get Bella to go into her cat basket. Well, it used to be, but she's wise to it now. I'm dreading the next time I have to get her into a cat basket, last time I had to do it it took me an hour...

Quimby

My tribute to the Tom and Jerry cartoons I used to watch when I was a kid. It's a pity the BBC no longer has holes in its schedule that it has to plug with repeats of theatrical shorts. This is based on the train set in "The Night before Christmas"

"Twenty-two minutes late, badger ate a junction box at New Malden." *

This is the Hastings Line to a T.

* See The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin

Leaf on the line

Hastings is at the far southern end of a railway line that has been causing headaches ever since it was built in the 1850s.

For a start it's built through the beautiful countryside of the High Weald. Of course, 'beautiful' to a railway engineer translates as 'awkward' - it cuts through a series of sandstone ridges, waterlogged clay basins and ancient woodlands. There are eight tunnels between Tonbridge and Hastings, jerry built on the cheap by subcontractors who only lined the tunnels with one row of bricks. Several of tunnels collapsed a few years after the line opened and had to be rebuilt with extra courses of bricks added to the inside of the tunnel to make them more stable. This made the tunnels too narrow for normal trains to be able to pass one another while inside them, so the Victorians built special narrow trains specifically for the line - a tradition that continued until the mid 80s when the line was electrified and the tracks inside the narrowest tunnels were singled. The train pictured is one of the old narrow bodied diesel 'Thumpers' I used to commute to London on.

There are a lot of woodlands facing the track all the way down the line, and every autumn the leaves fall onto the track. This gets run over by the trains and turns into a slippery mulch which greatly reduces the grip between the wheels and the track. Then consider some of the gradients the trains have to haul themselves up and down. The trains can literally be brought to a standstill by a few trees and a windy day.

A few years ago South East Trains decided that the solution to their problem would be to cut down the trees. After all, if there are no trees, there are no leaves, right? So they cut down swathes of trees on the embankments and cuttings along the route. Alas, what they forgot was that by removing the trees they also disturbed the root system that helped bind the steep slopes of the clay earthworks together. And earlier this year it started raining and didn't stop for three months. A series of landslips happened along a fifteen mile stretch of track and the line was closed for three months.

However, to the best of my knowledge, no train has ever actually fallen over like the one in the strip.

Kiti Howaito

According to her biography on the Sanrio website, ティ・ホワイト or Kitty White lives 'somewhere in Suburban London'. It's strange to think that this most Japanese of kawaii icons supposedly comes from Bromley or Croydon or Dagenham. Even odder, Hello Kitty has a pet cat! Oh, and her blood type is A.

This is my attempt at reproducing a generic TV newsroom, along the Sky News model of clashing colours, big video screens and star interviews that reveal absolutely nothing.

Stern face

There are few things as funny as a cat trying to scowl at you. As the career of Grumpy Cat and this photo of Billy proves...

When lolcats strike

It's your duty to watch those cute cat videos. Civilisation depends on it.

HD

Unfortunately, it doesn't matter how many pixels you broadcast in, until GoComics introduces its zoom facility to Sherpa we're stuck with a maximum resolution of 600 pixels across.

Of course, this blog has been in HD for the last two years. Click on any of these strips to see them at a glorious 1200 pixel resolution.

The right hand panel was drawn as small as I could make it using the thinnest pen I could find, and then scanned at 1,200 dpi - a good 600% higher than my usual sample rate when scanning. The idea was to get the rough finish and texture you'd expect when seeing something in much finer detail than usual. Of course, then I had to reduce the final artowrk to get it to fit into GoComics' 600 pixel width limit, and all the roughness vanished. So I've had to reintroduce it again using Photoshop filters.

Window flags

One of the odder things that you see around World Cup time are windows which have had all their light completely blocked by an England flag. This usually signifies one or all of these things...

• The owner of the flag has accidentally broken his window in a bizarre head-butting accident and this is a replacement.
• The owner of the flag thinks beer and football are far more important than ever having a chance of getting a girlfriend.
• There is a high probablity the owner of the flag has a Citroen Saxo rusting on bricks in the wasteland that was once a front garden.

Wayne Rooney is a footballist. He looks like a potato, but has a slightly lower intellect.

The Ingerlish flag

The English flag is the cross of Saint George - a red cross on a white field. It's recognisable to everyone in the country - even UKIP voters understand what it means. Only football fans are so dumb that they have to have the word "England' written on the flag so they know which country it belongs to. However, they pronounce the word with three syllables, as that makes it easier to chant aggressively while drunk.

I know. I'm being quite unreasonable about this. But soccer during the World cup is inescapable, and the sheer relentless ubiquity of the game drives me up the wall. (I've had to recast that last sentence five or six times, taking out a different swearword each time.)

Has it been four years already?

Yes, we're getting ready for the World Cup again. I've got a pile of DVD's and a stack of books ready to last me through the summer while soccer infiltrates every waking hour that God made. I'm reasonably confident that England won't make it past the first round this time, and if by come miracle we manage to get to the last 16 we'll be eliminated on penalties as normal. The prospect of England actually winning the Cup doesn't bear thinking about. We still haven't got over winning the cup in 1966. If we win it again this year you'll NEVER HEAR THE END OF IT!

The gnome on the left is in sort of Brazilian colours, while the one on the right started off being in a sort of West Ham strip, but ended up in different colours to make him stand out from the blue of the sky. The one in the middle is the Ref, which is why he's wearing glasses.

The Cat Who Stares at Gnomes

It's properly summer here in Hastings, and that means I like to spend my evenings out on the balcony to my flat, looking over the communal gardens, sitting in my garden chair reading. (Incidentally, I've just finished Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312, very highly recommended if you like cerebral wide screen space opera with no plot.) It also means that as soon as I sit down, there's a black and white presence sitting in the flowerbed directly beneath me, staring up at me.

Pyoing and other sound effects

When I was a kid I decided I would compile a dictionary of sound effects as used in comics. I went through my wardrobe of comics (when you're 9 years old what's the point of using a wardrobe to store anything as dull as mere clothes?) and catalogued in sort of alphabetical order all the onomatopoeic words I could find. You've seen several of them appear in the strip. But there are some which I've never been able to find a home for.

The most imaginative sound effects came from 'Look-In' magazine, the Junior TV Times. It was full of comic strips about the TV and pop stars of the mid 70s, drawn to order by some stunning Spanish artists whose grip on the English language was as bad as their sense of comic layout was good.

My two favourite sound effects I've never been able to use are:

KLEEKA! - The sound of David Cassidy's cheap retractable ballpoint pen being used as a weapon.

THOOOOOM-BANG! - A coconut exploding in a fairground.

One day I shall find a home for these...