Meet the beach

Originally published 12 July 2010

Some cats and a beach. All I need now is a balding bloke in a bow tie and I would have had the premise to Buzza Wuzza, but no, I missed that chance and decided to start in a ghost and blue quadrilateral doctor-free universe.

The strip is set in my home town of Hastings, and Hastings has a beach (though we don’t like to tell anyone it’s entirely made out to pebbles until they have made the journey here), so it would be a waste not to use it. . So once a year Smith and Jones make the mile-long trek to the sea.

I think at this point we have a generic beach, hence the sand - the strip would gradually become more geographically accurate as the story went on.

Ride a white swan

Here we are at the boating pond on Hastings seafront. I don't think this is what Marc Bolan meant when he wrote his seminal hippy boogie back in 1970, but who knows, stranger things have happened. Debussy wrote his gorgeous tone poem La Mer while he was staying next door at Eastbourne and staring at the grey English Channel from his hotel room, so maybe the diminutive glam pixie came up with the idea for 'Ride a white swan' after seeing our swan shaped pedalos. One mad art project I know they have inspired is this one...