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.

Another post

More post-impressions, this time of iconic Po-Modern architecture, including the AT&T building, the Citicorp tower and a Greek column (no self respecting building from the 1980s could be seen without one).

Who do you do?

There used to be three impressions that every Brit could do - Tommy Cooper, Frank Spencer and Michael Caine. If you were a light entertainer and wanted to drop an impression into your routine these were the default settings. All of these characters date from the 1970s - anyone attempting them now is either being ironic or so out of touch that they think there are still only three TV channels.

Tommy Cooper was a comic genius, a shambling giant of a man who combined seemingly inept magical routines with corny one liners, and made it work. His catchphrase was 'Just like that', accompanied by a shimmying movement of the hands and his unmistakable 'aharharharhar' laugh. And he wore a fez, - fezzes were cool long before The Doctor adopted one.

For an sample of his material visit http://www.guy-sports.com/humor/comedians/comedian_tommy_cooper.htm

Spoon Jar Jar Spoon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc3u9bVV6s4

Frank Spencer was a character played by Michael Crawford in a BBC sircom called 'Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em'. He played an ineffectual accident prone mothers' boy who had somehow married Betty, played by Michelle Dotrice. Everything he touched would turn out to be a spectacular disaster. And we are talking spectacular here - Frank's accidents would often involve some terrifying stunt work, which Crawford would do himself. I remember being spellbound by the episode where Frank ends up hanging from the bumper of a Morris Minor which is threatening to tip over the edge of Beachy Head, the highest cliff on the South Coast. It's a pity that when you look at them today, the stunts remain impressive, but the rest of the scripts are sooooo dated. The stock phrase of Frank's simpering "Oooh. Betty! the cat's done a whoospie on my beret' gives you an idea of the level of humour involved.

For the start of the Beachy Head sequence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LuuqDlCKXs

Michael Caine, everyone knows. But his two catchphrases were actually donated to him by an impressionist, Mike Yarwood. One was the rather obvious 'My name is Michael Caine', a phrase which became so famous that the band Madness wrote a song around it, and got the real Michael Caine to voice it on the record. The other was based on a Parkinson interview where Caine was forever coming up with odd facts, but never actually used the phrase 'now, not a lot of people know that'.

Here's a much later Parkinson interview, with Michael Caine impersonating himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0F3kY3uxU

The fourth frame is of course Groucho Marx. You know who he is.

Mike Pike Essipode 4

Fairly straightforward this week - there's only one period joke to explain.

This was the mid 80s and there was a circulation war going on between the tabloids, and it was being fought with bingo cards. The cards with your numbers on were free, but the only way to find out what numbers had been called was to buy the paper every day. The idea of gambling via newsprint slowly permeated up to the quality press, by 1985 it was even happening in the Times, though that was called 'Portfolio' and was based on the movements in the stock exchange.

Newspaper bingo games eventually got killed off by the a combination of the internet becoming popular, and the launch of the National Lottery.

As ever, I like to root my cartoons in geographical reality, and this weeks strip takes place at two different addresses in Princes Street, Tunbridge Wells.

Millie No. 4

Our first view of 36, Grouting Terrace, Catford SE6. Don't look for it on Google Earth, it's not there. But click on the location tag at the bottom of the post and you'll get an idea of its imagined vicinity.

"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.