Stre-e-e-etch

Inspired by Billy, who is a very elastic cat. I've never seen any cat stretch to the lengths that he can manage.

Incidentally, if you're wondering why I'm not drawing these Sunday strips in the traditional three-bank funny pages format, it's because I don't think that's how Smith will be seen in the future. Print is dead, and the parameters we have to work to nowadays are not those that suit newspaper production, but those that suit smart phones and tablets. It's an interesting space to work with, and it's let me try several ideas that just wouldn't have worked before. This is a strip I could never have done in the daily format.

Wildlife

Hold on a minute... where have all the woods gone?

Fear not, this is not a mistake on my part. It's quite deliberate. I wanted a plain background in order to be able to show the assorted flying beasties clearly. And my rationale is that St Helens' Park is a series of woodlands and meadows - so Smith and Jones have merely reached one of the clearings.

So you can follow this trek on the map like Watership Down or The Lord of the Rings, Smith and Jones live a couple of hundred yards south of the bottom of the map and entered the woods at St Helen's Avenue. They're working their way north and will eventually reach the De Roemer Fields to the north.

Anyone who's been to Scotland in the summer will know midges. They'll also know that I've somewhat underexaggerated the problem