Scratch post

Originally published 27 July 2010

Anyone with cats knows what this is all about.

Shred from cover to cover

I no longer religiously buy a Sunday paper, but I'll occasionally succumb to the Sunday Times or the Sunday Post. When I was a kid we would get The Observer, and Dad would never let anyone read any of the paper's many sections until he'd read them first.

Incise incise

Originally published 12 April 2010

This is one of those strips that doesn't make sense in black and white. What is Smith doing to Eric the Circle? Only once the post production and colouring has been done does it become apparent that Smith is standing behind a big picture window.

So this is the first example of me taking the standard TV production method of 'fixing it in post' and applying it to comics. Beforehand I would have laboriously tried to convey the shine and transparency of the window in black and white. But now I'm working in colour, in Photoshop, it gives me a whole bunch of new effects I can use. But I always try not to binge on the effects - at heart I still want this strip to look hand drawn.

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.

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.