"That's not writing - that's just typing"*

I do think I write in a completely different way to the way I did before computers became commonplace. I was a latecomer to computing, not really seeing the point of them until the first Apple Mac SE's arrived in the UK, the black and white ones with screens the size of letterboxes. Before then I did everything in longhand in that meticulously angular italic writing that seems to be issued to graphic designers at birth. Sentences and paragraphs came out fully formed with the words and the thoughts in the right order, because if you had any amendments to make the only option was to start afresh and write it all out again.

Now I find myself writing words at random and then them order the right shuffling into. It's all a bit lazy really.

Rest assured, Smith the cartoon strip itself remains lovingly hand crafted from the moment the first notes go into my note book up to the moment the finished black and white art is scanned for colouring.


*Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac (or possibly Jack Kerouac on Truman Capote - the Google results for this quote are a bit ambiguous.

Kitten on the keys

This is for anyone who has tried to work in the same room as a cat. Gizmo likes to sit on my paper and play catch the pencil when I'm trying to draw. Whereas Smudge...

Of course, she's not a big fan of the latest iMacs - what's the point of a screen so thin you can't even balance on it, let alone sprawl? Her preferred trick now is to walk all obvhjwccmVJ,CVver the keyboard when I'm not looking. When she was a kitten she even managed to crash the computer network at the vets by jumping onto the computer terminal.

Typewriter

I'm going to be introducing a new character in about a month's time, but to do that I need a typewriter. When I originally did this thirty years ago everyone knew what a typewriter was, but in this digital age I now feel I have to plant the typewriter first and explain what it is.

Sometimes you have to go retro in a cartoon anyway. These days most electrical tools have become small white boxes. A phone could be an MP3 player could be a computer could be a video recorder. To counter this we cartoonists have to go back in time just to convey an object's function. This probably explains why the Beano comics I read as in kid in the 1970s seemed to be visually stuck in the 1950s.

The typewriter is my dad's old Olivetti, in full late 70's aubergine regalia, so it it matched the bathroom. (Don't ask.)