Crossed eyes

I have no pictures of the real Smith and Jones, who used to live in the house next door to me when I was a kid, but they were both cross eyed pedigree Siamese cats.

This is very much what the real Smith looked like - he had that oriental look and a pair of bright blue, subtly off-beam eyes...

...While this is how I remember Jones. Rather than the pale chocolate point I depict her as in the cartoon, she was actually a seal tabby point. Having to draw in those complicated tabby markings would have meant she would have lost clarity around the face once the cartoons were reduced to 600 dpi wide as GoGomics require.

Mike Pike Essipode 10

How to get yourself out of a tight plot corner with the use of some totally unconvincing non-science. But, hey, look who gets to have a guest appearance as next door's cat. Yes, it is Smith, in possibly the only three frames ever drawn with him and a human being in the same frame. And he's not too pleased about it.

Next week, doom on 96.7 VHF, which was (and still may be for all I know) the frequency for BBC Radio Kent, though we now call it FM.

 

First post

My comic, 'Smith', started appearing on GoComics one year ago with the strip you see above. In that time two things have surprised me:

1) I'm still doing it.
2) It's getting a following.

Thanks to everyone responsible for item number two - you are the ones that ensure item number one keeps happening.

For those that don't know the strip, it's a thrice weekly strip about a couple of domestic cats, Smith, the Seal Point Siamese, and his sister, Jones, who is more of a fudge-point than a chocolate point. You can find it at www.gocomics.com/Smith

It's based on a couple of cats that used to live next door to me when I was growing up in Tunbridge Wells in the late 70s. I didn't have a cat of my own at the time, so I effectively adopted these two. When their owner moved out of town and took the cats with them I started drawing cartoons of them, and this developed into a series of unpublished daily strips that I drew religiously until a year after I left school and had to join the real world.

Fast forward 28 years, and they're back. In the intervening time I'd gone through a series of dead end jobs, finally found a niche as a graphic artist and production manager at a magazine publishing company, concurrently scripted a daily comic strip, 'Millie' for the Daily Mirror in London, discovered the theatre, and moved to Hastings. Millie had finished in the Mirror 15 years ago (curse you Piers Morgan!) It was time to get back to the pens and see if I still had it.

It appears I did. You are here.

I'll be doing several things in this blog:

a) I'll be providing commentary on new strips as they appear, explaining some of the more Brit-centric references to my largely US-based audience, and telling the story of how they came to be.
b) I'll be posting some of the original Smith cartoons from the 80s.
c) I'll occasionally post some of my previous strips, Millie, Mike Pike and Riverfields, and anything else from my filing cabinet that looks interesting.
d) Anything else that takes my fancy. It's my blog - so I can be as self indulgent as I like. So, ner!

To be continued...