Typewriter

I'm going to be introducing a new character in about a month's time, but to do that I need a typewriter. When I originally did this thirty years ago everyone knew what a typewriter was, but in this digital age I now feel I have to plant the typewriter first and explain what it is.

Sometimes you have to go retro in a cartoon anyway. These days most electrical tools have become small white boxes. A phone could be an MP3 player could be a computer could be a video recorder. To counter this we cartoonists have to go back in time just to convey an object's function. This probably explains why the Beano comics I read as in kid in the 1970s seemed to be visually stuck in the 1950s.

The typewriter is my dad's old Olivetti, in full late 70's aubergine regalia, so it it matched the bathroom. (Don't ask.)

Teasers for July 2011

Once a year Smith and Jones make the trek down to the beach here at Hastings. This year they will discover not just sun and sand, but something even better...

Some photo reference for this summer's story...

Mike Pike Essipode 3

First of all, I've worked out how to get bigger scans up on the blog. (An entire blogosphere goes 'duh!' as one.) To see a readable version of this month's essipode simply click on the image to the right and you'll see a much bigger version appear.

OK, what's going on here?

Frame One: Rod Lucas. The nearest thing BBC Radio Kent had to a shock jock in the mid eighties - a bit of a populist conservative, very much of his time, he started off playing records to housewives and then moved on to an evening phone in show. He was very much the kind of bloke who would complain on air about foreigners all the time and that the country was going to the dogs. He's now working in Spain for a radio station for British ex-pats. Insert your own irony here.

Frame Two: Observers book of Weird Thingies. First off, I couldn't spell weird - remember, it's I before E except after W. Observers books were pocket sized hardback spotters' books on all subjects, published by a company whose only other product appeared to be the Beatrix Potter books. Subjects would range from the obvious like birds, butterflies and trees, but soon veered into more esoteric fare like lichens, canals and 'larger moths'.

Frame Six: French exchanges were reciprocal arrangements between schools in France and England, where families would host unwilling 13 year old students in each other's countries over the Easter holidays. It was essentially an orgy of international shoplifting, paid for by each country's respective educational system.

Frame Seven: Eric is essentially my avatar. I did look like that in the 80s. The reference to Jenny is a bit of an in-joke - she was the name of the love interest in a musical I had written the book for the year before. And no, that's never getting an airing again! The pub interior I've drawn is of one of the booths in the Royal Oak in Tunbridge Wells.

And yes, it is all very Prisoners of the Sun, isn't it? More follows next week, in an essipode that is not quite as terrifying as the teaser promises...

Millie No 3

Wendy James? Transvision Vamp? Remember them? No, me neither.

I'm being completely unfair. I'm sure she can say with even more justification "Millie? What was that? Don't remember it!" And "Baby I don't care" was a bloody good single. After the Vamps broke up Elvis Costello wrote an entire album for her, so I think that shows she had more talent than the critics ever credited her for.

But sadly I still get the feeling that the next time we'll see her is in the line up on Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

I don't know if Jason Donovan ever made it over the pond, but he was once a cog in the PWL hit factory that gave us Kylie Minogue and Rick Astley, and was serious manufactured pop royalty. He started off in the same Australian soap as Kylie, playing her boyfriend and eventually married her in the show. He then sang a duet with her which was Number 1 for what felt like a year. He's since found his niche in musical theatre (he was the first Joseph when Andrew Lloyd Webber revived Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat).

The Wall

Rules are rules of course, and Smith should never be allowed to actually get up onto the wall, any more than Charlie Brown should ever be allowed to kick the football. Nonetheless, it's good to let him have something approaching a victory every now and again.

Snowflakes

Is it actually mathematically possible for every single snowflake to have fallen on planet earth to be different, while remaining six sided and symmetrical along three axes? Water is strange stuff indeed. While we're at it, why is water the only stuff in the universe that gets bigger when it gets colder? Answers on a postcard please....

Burns Night

Aye. 'Tis Burrrrns night the neet, and in lieu of piping in a haggis here's a Riverfields comics from a few years ago.

Riverfields is still up on the original Comics Sherpa site. To read it from the beginning go to http://www.comicssherpa.com/site/feature?uc_comic=csmdx&uc_full_date=20060807

300!

No, not the tiresome film about what happens when you let Phys. Ed. teachers run an ancient Greek city state*: 300 is the number of subscribers Smith now has on GoComics.

A sincere thank you everyone who has subscribed. (Adopts dodgy mid-Atlantic accent, dons spangly jacket.)  I'd like to thank my wife Linda, my cats Smudge and Gizmo, GoComics, Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Jobs, Dave Adobe, Nigel Rotring and all those wonderful subscribers out there who are part of the Smith family - it couldn't have been possible without you. Shucks. Etc.

* Mainly shouting, sadism and an inevitable pointless death masquerading as glory, it appears. I was rooting for the Persians.

Incise Incise

All cartoonists are to a certain extent a collection of influences from those who come before them, as a rule we tend to be self taught and we learn from the masters. This is a tribute to two of them.

First of all we have the freewheeling madness and slapstick of the Looney Tunes cartoons. This could really only be improved by having an extra frame showing Smith hovering above the ice hole, carrying a sign with: 'Oh no!' written on it.

Second, Bristow, by Frank Dickens. Dickens had a habit of using wonderfully literate sound effects in his strip, something I like to do occasionally as well. Why use 'scratch scratch' when 'incise incise' communicates what is happening even better?

See below for an example of the original. © Frank Dickens 1969.

Other treasured examples: Bristow shaving - Gillette, Gillette. Bristow shaking his fist - Brandish, Brandish. Snow falling in three panels while carollers sing - Deep, deep; crisp, crisp; even, even.

Mike Pike Essipode 2

...and it's all starting to get terribly TinTin-like.

Frame 1: The Miners. The first three essipodes were drawn in 1984, when the miners strike was at its height. Essentially a battle between the right-wing ideologue Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister, and the even more extreme left-wing ideologue Arthur Scargill, the leader of the National Union of Miners, this year long strike split the country in two. In Yorkshire and Durham miners were fighting for their livelihoods, but the good conservative people of the home counties just wanted all the nasty shouting to stop. Thatcher eventually won, the union was emasculated and within ten years the mines were privatised and then closed down.
Frame 1: The Argies. The Falklands Conflict (it never quite got promoted to war) had only taken place two years earlier.
Frame 2: The Daily Express. Possibly the nuttiest tabloid in the world. I'm not talking trashy, I'm not talking downmarket. I'm talking frothing at the mouth raving bonkers. The Express is the paper that is still convinced that Princess Diana was assassinated by the Duke of Edinburgh - a couple of years ago you could guarantee a new Diana conspiracy theory every Monday. Imagine Fox News reincarnated as a newspaper, only madder and even less balanced.
Frame 7: Trench Wood. A post-war housing estate in North Tonbridge.

Next essipode - it gets even more TinTinny...

Millie No. 2

Daily Mirror, Saturday 7th April 1990

This was actually written to be the fourth strip, but the strip two was cut by the cartoon editor at the Mirror, and three and four were reordered for narrative clarity. There was a bit of conflict at the beginning about the level of realism in Millie, with the Mirror wanting it to be a realistic strip, and me wanting to go off on flights of fantasy now and again - it's a cartoon after all. It took a while for us to work out what the other wanted and where the boundaries lay.

EastEnders is a long running soap set in the East End of London. It's been going for 25 years but it feels much longer. It is famed for its melodramatic storylines and general air of misery - you can always guarantee that someone will die/get mortally injured/commit suicide/burn their house to the ground during the merry Christmas day episode.

Here's the script of the missing strip:

WEEK TWO

1. Richard is saying his goodbyes to the old home. He stands beside an old oak tree, looking up at an overhanging bough.
RICHARD: GOODBYE, GREAT OAK TREE FROM WHICH I USED TO HANG MY SWING...

2. Richard on the gravel path outside the front of his chocolate box thatched cottage. He is starting to get a tad emotional.
RICHARD: GOODBYE OLD AND FRIENDLY COTTAGE. NO LONGER WILL I LEAVE FOREHEAD PRINTS ON THY ANCIENT BEAMS...

3. Richard on a hillock overseeing is beloved countryside. He addresses the elements in declamatory tones, arms outstretched.
RICHARD: GOODBYE TREES! GOODBYE HILLS! GOODBYE HEDGEROWS!

4. Working up to a climax, his arms are now raised above his head, as a dirty black cloud forms above him.
RICHARD: GOODBY BIRDS OF THE SKY AND ANIMALS OF THE FIELD! GOODBYE O ELEMENTAL FORCES OF NATURE!

5. Reversed out silhouette panel. Richard is struck by a bolt of lightning from the cloud.
SFX: ZAP!

6. Richard sits on the hillock, eyes wide open, his hair on end, his clothes in tatters, gently emitting small clouds of smoke. Millie wanders up behind him, hands in pockets, v. matter-of-fact.
MILLIE: I DON'T THINK THEY'RE GOING TO MISS YOU.

Inevitable

Some jokes are sort of inevitable, and all you can do is acknowledge it.

Snow!

This was written in June and drawn in November, expecting the snow which actually fell in December to fall in January like it normally does.

Britain can't cope with snow. A centimetre of snow will stop the trains running*. An inch of snow is enough to shut the country down. Two inches of snow is snowmageddon. Last month we had nine inches - civilization survived barely intact, but sales of those lawn ornaments of fake Christmas snowmen holding signs saying 'Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow' plummeted.

The photo shows a deadly smattering of snow falling on The Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells. As you can see, conditions are already so bad that it's regressed to the Eighteenth Century.

* To be fair to SouthEastern Trains, a single leaf on the line is normally enough to stop their trains running.

Scratch post

Sometimes all I have to do is watch what my cats do and the strip writes itself.

Mike Pike Essipode 1

It's 1984. This was drawn for a fortnightly listings magazine in West Kent that lasted about three issues. Despite the magazine collapsing before I ever got anything published, I returned to it a year later and ended up with two finished stories divided between 25 'essipodes'.

Frame one actually does show Tonbridge. You can see the Castle pub in the foreground and, over the bridge with the ornamental lamps you can see what used to be the Nat West bank (now a Pizza Express).

Being set in the mid eighties, this portrays Tonbridge as a boarded up town centre - Britain is slowly dragging itself out of the recession of the early eighties, which Margaret Thatcher imposed on us 'for our own good'. I was unemployed and oh so grateful at the time. The city was booming but the recovery hadn't quite arrived in the provinces yet.

Tonbridge is like Catford, one of those not quite places. It has a town centre consisting of a single street, a rail junction, an old ruined Norman castle and no entertainment to speak of. The cinema had closed, there were no night clubs and the theatre was a converted Oast House capable of holding an audience of about eighty. At the time it was a town that ran on football and alcohol. For anything else you had to travel to the surrounding towns of Tunbridge Wells, Sevenoaks or Maidstone.

It's my home town, I lived there for the first five years of my life and still have lots of family there. Personally, I love it, despite all its deficiencies.

The Angel Centre was a council-run multi-purpose building built to address the lack of facilities in the town. It boasted a not-quite-good-enough theatre (very seldom used), some just-about-adequate conference facilities and meetings rooms, an indoor sparts hall, and a bar. To pay for it they gave two thirds of the space to a department store and a supermarket.

Note Trish's none-more 1984 T-shirt.

Millie No. 1

Daily Mirror, Saturday 31 March 1990

This was the first ever Millie strip. Millie was a strip that ran for five years in the Daily Mirror, written my myself and drawn by the incredibly talented Roger Mahoney (now currently sublimating his easy and fluent art style by drawing Andy Capp meticulously in the style of the late Reg Smythe).

It was originally written as a daily strip, but the Mirror gave us a trial run for the first five months or so as a weekly, appearing as a two deck strip on Saturdays. I wasn't complaining, I was a raw and untried writer and this was my big break. I duly ripped up everything I had written up to that point and remixed it into the new format. This is why a lot of these early strips could also work as two separate strips - it wasn't until a few months later that I got used to the new length, and then we were granted a daily spot on the comics page.

I'll have to explain some of the early 90s references. The Hippodrome was at the time owned by Peter Stringfellow, and the sort of place you would find Page 3 models, soap stars and tabloid gossip column hacks, along with a  lot of young women in white stilettos. As far as I was concerned it has 'avoid' written all over it, but to a 14 year old teenager like Millie it would be the epitome of glamour.

'...the streets being paved with gold' - the legend of Dick Whittington is the story of a poor boy who travelled to London (with his cat) to find his fortune because he'd heard of the aforementioned metaphorical paving and became Lord Mayor of London three times over. Based on a true story, Richard Whittington did exist and he actually became Mayor four times, a case of the truth actually being better than the legend.

If there is an opposite to the epitome of glamour, Catford is it. A dreary south London suburb, not quite Lewisham, not quite Bromley, one of those places you pass through on the way to somewhere else, I picked it as the epitome of nowhere - and because it had the word 'cat' in it.

I'll be posting Millie strips on Saturdays from now on.

Q. What's brown and sticky? A. A stick

Show your cat a stick, a biro, anything pointy... see what happens.

Note: I usually put these strips up on the blog just before I go to bed, and about five hours before they go live on GoComics, because I'm working to GMT and I think GoComics works to Central Time.

Two of the cats behind 'Smith'

Meet Smudge and Gizmo, the two cats who allow me to cadge ideas off of them.

Smudge is the grand old lady sitting in the bean bag. Yes, she is the cat with a wall obsession in the cartoon strip. She's a delightful and loving cat but with soft fur and a purr that can cause interference to FM radio, but she definitely has to be the one in charge.

She's 14 years old now. She lost her brother Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley, and also appearing in the strip) a couple of years ago, and needed someone new to boss about, so Gizmo arrived to fill the vacancy.

Gizmo's about five and spends most of his time ridding the world of the menace of feathers and newspapers. When not chasing inanimate objects he becomes The Most Pathetic Cat In The World.

More photos later.

Always pause at the threshold *

* I think this poem title by Paul Gallico (yes, the Poseidon Adventure guy) inspired today's strip. I don't remember the rest of the poem, I just remember the title. I found a copy of the book, 'Honorable Cat', that this came from in one of Tunbridge Wells' many second hand book shops, popped out again to find an ATM and by the time I returned it was gone. Pah! But it inspired this strip so it wasn't a totally wasted lunch break.

Smith's first appearance in print

Here, taken from the Autumn 1980 issue of The Leopard, the magazine of the Skinners' School, Tunbridge Wells, is the first ever published Smith cartoon. It appeared when I was 16, and was credited to A. J. Pilcher of Form 61BL.

Let's put that in perspective. When this was published, The Empire Strikes Back had just been released, the Moscow Olympics had just taken place, there were still hostages in the US embassy in Iran and everyone was convinced that we'd die in a nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR at some point in the not too distant future. Ah, happy carefree days!

It's remarkable how little Smith has changed since then (apart from the loss of the pretentious teenage handwriting).

This is as angry as I get, folks.

I don’t do politics very often in ‘Smith’ - its a subtle art full of pitfalls and I don’t think it has a place in a simple cartoon strip about cats. However, that doesn’t stop me from occasionally reflecting the absurdity of the results of our leaders' political machinations with some absurdity of my own.

This strip was written last summer (I like to keep a good six month buffer of scripts ready just in case I ever have a fallow patch with no ideas), expecting the austerity measures brought in by the coalition to start biting about now. As they have, with thousands of public servants losing funding and jobs left right and centre, and VAT going up to 20%, but strangely no bankers feeling the pinch.

But that’s enough of that. That’s just whining. If you want a comic strip that’s just a whine read Mallard Filmore instead. I’ll just stick to being daft.

Incidentally - to make the last panel look sufficiently childlike I drew it with my left hand. Smith returns to right-handed full colour normality on Wednesday.

First post

My comic, 'Smith', started appearing on GoComics one year ago with the strip you see above. In that time two things have surprised me:

1) I'm still doing it.
2) It's getting a following.

Thanks to everyone responsible for item number two - you are the ones that ensure item number one keeps happening.

For those that don't know the strip, it's a thrice weekly strip about a couple of domestic cats, Smith, the Seal Point Siamese, and his sister, Jones, who is more of a fudge-point than a chocolate point. You can find it at www.gocomics.com/Smith

It's based on a couple of cats that used to live next door to me when I was growing up in Tunbridge Wells in the late 70s. I didn't have a cat of my own at the time, so I effectively adopted these two. When their owner moved out of town and took the cats with them I started drawing cartoons of them, and this developed into a series of unpublished daily strips that I drew religiously until a year after I left school and had to join the real world.

Fast forward 28 years, and they're back. In the intervening time I'd gone through a series of dead end jobs, finally found a niche as a graphic artist and production manager at a magazine publishing company, concurrently scripted a daily comic strip, 'Millie' for the Daily Mirror in London, discovered the theatre, and moved to Hastings. Millie had finished in the Mirror 15 years ago (curse you Piers Morgan!) It was time to get back to the pens and see if I still had it.

It appears I did. You are here.

I'll be doing several things in this blog:

a) I'll be providing commentary on new strips as they appear, explaining some of the more Brit-centric references to my largely US-based audience, and telling the story of how they came to be.
b) I'll be posting some of the original Smith cartoons from the 80s.
c) I'll occasionally post some of my previous strips, Millie, Mike Pike and Riverfields, and anything else from my filing cabinet that looks interesting.
d) Anything else that takes my fancy. It's my blog - so I can be as self indulgent as I like. So, ner!

To be continued...