Schlump

Verandas are useful things. There are several Victorian villas in the vicinity which have them. I thought I'd borrow one for the day.

Patiently...

I'm using the time honoured third-person interior monologue device here, as used by Snoopy in Peanuts and Garfield in, um, Garfield. As ever the war between cat and seagull contunues, and as ever the seagull wins.

Away from the strip, today's the day Linda and I will be welcoming Billy and Annabelle, two new rescue kittens, into our home. I'll have photos up as soon as they get here. In the meantime here's their back story...

Billy and Annabelle are brother and sister, they're five months old and they're black with white flashes on their nose, chest and socks. They come to us courtesy of the Blue Cross rehoming centre in Northiam. They were born to a feral mother who found a big converted oast house in the countryside, walked in through the cat flap and made her nest in an unused room. Believe it or not, it was five weeks before the mother and her kittens were discovered! This makes me ask two questions - did the owners of the house not have noses, and who lives in a house so large they don't notice a strange cat wandering about feeding her kittens?

The kittens have been at the Blue Cross since they were discovered (mum vanished as soon as people turned up) and the good people there have been gradually acclimatising Billy and Annabel to human contact ever since. On Friday, they come to live with us. They're still rather nervous around people, but they're gradually learning to trust us. Billy's the more outgoing of the two, he's not sure he likes being stroked yet, but scratch him on the head in just the right way and you will be rewarded with the loudest purr ever. Given the choice, Annabel will just be a shape underneath a blanket, we'll be sure to make sure she has one when she gets here, so she can emerge in her own time.

Feed the birds

The weather girl is Kaddy Lee Preston, BBC South East's local weather presenter. The robin isn't. I was searching for a photo of a robin on a postbox in the snow, a Christmas card staple, but found this chirpy little bird on a post instead.

Note Jones' prehensile tail.

Carrot Thief

OK, I do know how to spell weird really. Jones, however, is a cat, and therefore doesn't. Always remember, I before E except after W.

Snowcatsh

Is it a snow cat, or does it look more like some sort of devilish pagan snow creature? Whatever, it's Jones's answer to the Snowdog that we were introduced to this Christmas as the Snowman's sidekick.

Pinnnnngggg-Blip!

I have no idea where this one came from - I just liked the idea of Smith using his tail as a periscope.

Whump

As I mentioned in a Millie post a week ago, if snow is going to fall in Britain at any time, it's usually round about now, just after Christmas when it's no longer seasonal and just gets in the way. I'm writing this on Sunday night, a week ago, and the long range weather forecast says we're expecting some snow over the next week or so. If we're extremely unlucky an inch of snow will fall, officially closing the entire country down, as we can't cope with snow. People will forget how to drive - trains will be paralyzed as the points freeze up in that totally unpredictable way they do every single bloody winter - supermarkets will emptied by panic buyers. If we're lucky, less will fall, but the country will still close down anyway. 21 miles away, in France, life will continue as normal under a three foot blanket of ice.

Millie Week 71: Mon 13 - Sat 18 January 1992

If there's going to be any snow in Britain, it's going to fall in January. It will leave a covering about half an inch deep and will cause the entire country to grind to a halt. I was writing the strip six weeks in advance of publication at the time, so I had to learn how to become a long range weather forecaster if I wanted to do anything like this in the hope that it would turn out to be topical.

You may recognise the third strip - I recycled it for a Smith cartoon a couple of years ago...

In the Bleak Midwinter

Christina Rosetti's haunting Christmas carol is much loved. But I've always thought that she lost her way in the 'snow on snow' bit. OK, we get it, it's snowed a lot.

If you don't know 'In the Bleak Midwinter' - here it is...

Hi, 'T'.

The secret life of Scrumpy Jack

I won't tell if you don't...

Health and Safety

A necessary evil. I'm all for safety at work, and I applaud the safety advances in places like the construction industry, but the H&S industry tends to expand into places where it's not needed. For me the limit was reached when I was working as a graphic designer at a printing company, and I had to waste a day on a course on 'how to pick up heavy objects'. At the end of the day I was given a card, which told me I was certified to pick up heavy objects for two years and gave an expiry date!  I can now use that card to get out of any heavy lifting as I haven't topped up my lugging things about knowledge.

If you have to go on a course just remember, it can be boiled down to these three things:

1) Bend your knees when picking things up off the floor.
2) Secure your ladder before going up it.
3) Cones can be a trip hazard.

Where's the snow?

It doesn't normally snow here in England in December. In fact it doesn't normally snow here at all. Until two years ago we've had a series of warm wet winters, with snow tending to appear for five minutes in February, and then disappearing again.

The last two winters have been terrible - with depths of snow up to an unprecedented COUPLE OF INCHES! Snowmageddon! The country closed down for a month, and Hastings was cut off from civilisation.

The weather is back normal this year - in fact I haven't had to switch the heating on at all yet this winter. So much for trying to anticipate the weather when I drew this...

Incidentally, the next month's worth of blog posts will have actually been written and posted in early December. We're off to New Mexico to visit Linda's parents this Christmas. So I've drawn two month's worth of strips and will be preparing a month's worth of blog posts before I go. If I can find WiFi in Clovis (there used to be a church on Prince St with really good WiFi) I'll post supplementary comments on GoComics and the Blog while I'm there...

April Fool

 

It's April Fool madness at Comics Sherpa, and Theresa Shepherd, the cartoonist who produces Snow Sez... emailed me to ask if I wanted to collaborate on something with her. This is what we came up with, with us guest drawing the first two frames of each other's strip, emailing ideas, scripts and Photoshop files to one another about two weeks before publication.

The top one is appearing on Smith's page, while the one underneath appears on Snow's page.

The removed heads are quite eerie aren't they?

The cartoon I had originally scheduled for today will be posted on July 1st instead.

Snowflakes

Is it actually mathematically possible for every single snowflake to have fallen on planet earth to be different, while remaining six sided and symmetrical along three axes? Water is strange stuff indeed. While we're at it, why is water the only stuff in the universe that gets bigger when it gets colder? Answers on a postcard please....

Incise Incise

All cartoonists are to a certain extent a collection of influences from those who come before them, as a rule we tend to be self taught and we learn from the masters. This is a tribute to two of them.

First of all we have the freewheeling madness and slapstick of the Looney Tunes cartoons. This could really only be improved by having an extra frame showing Smith hovering above the ice hole, carrying a sign with: 'Oh no!' written on it.

Second, Bristow, by Frank Dickens. Dickens had a habit of using wonderfully literate sound effects in his strip, something I like to do occasionally as well. Why use 'scratch scratch' when 'incise incise' communicates what is happening even better?

See below for an example of the original. © Frank Dickens 1969.

Other treasured examples: Bristow shaving - Gillette, Gillette. Bristow shaking his fist - Brandish, Brandish. Snow falling in three panels while carollers sing - Deep, deep; crisp, crisp; even, even.

Inevitable

Some jokes are sort of inevitable, and all you can do is acknowledge it.

Snow!

This was written in June and drawn in November, expecting the snow which actually fell in December to fall in January like it normally does.

Britain can't cope with snow. A centimetre of snow will stop the trains running*. An inch of snow is enough to shut the country down. Two inches of snow is snowmageddon. Last month we had nine inches - civilization survived barely intact, but sales of those lawn ornaments of fake Christmas snowmen holding signs saying 'Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow' plummeted.

The photo shows a deadly smattering of snow falling on The Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells. As you can see, conditions are already so bad that it's regressed to the Eighteenth Century.

* To be fair to SouthEastern Trains, a single leaf on the line is normally enough to stop their trains running.