Dolly shot

Originally published: March 8 2010

Comics can be very cinematic - this strip is essentially a dolly shot, with the camera pulling back gradually to reveal the bush in the final panel.

Smith's house at this point appears to be a red brick Victorian house, of the sort I used to live in in Tunbridge Wells. It gradually changed over the following year until it turned into a 1960s sitcom house of the kind Samantha and Darren lived in in Bewitched - essentially a bigger posher version of the flat I now live in in Hastings. The sash windows you see here have become picture windows, and the first floor has developed a balcony.

Over the hedge

It's been a hectic week this week - I've had no time to myself at all. It's all down to having one show ready for performance tonight and starting rehearsals on another one, so I've been trapped in draughty church halls every evening this week.

This cartoon came from watching Cholmondeley, Smudges big brother, negotiate his way along a dividing wall between gardens. He could manage the wall, he could manage the fence, but when he tried running along the top of the box hedge, it all went wrong for him.

This is one of my continuous background strips. It's a technique I've borrowed from one of my favourite strips when I was a kid, Maurice Dodd and Dennis Collins' 'The Perishers'. It's OK, Maurice says he got the idea from a 1930s strip called 'Pop' by Millar Watt, so it's not like he has an exclusive on the technique. It works the same way as animation, with a single background broken up into frames and the characters moving from frame to frame.

A previous example of mine from last summer's trip to Hastings' fishing beach.

...and a couple of examples from the masters, Collins and Dodd.