Millie Week 14

(Click on the strip to enlarge)

Oh dear - we're into early 90's musical reference overload here.

Millie's choices are extremely mainstream.

Bros was just coming to the end of its reign as the teeny boppers fave rave of choice. They were two brothers (and a spare bloke) who had been picked up by the Pet Shop Boys former manager and who were propelled to instant stardom with their rather good song 'When will I be famous?'. They followed that up with a few more singles that were alternately catchy and then tuneless. Maybe if they'd been given better songs they would have lasted longer. Not even their rabid fan base, the fearsome Brosettes, could save them from the slow inexorable decline into the dumper. One of them ended up in the West End, playing Danny in Grease. I have no idea what happened to the others.

Wet Wet Wet. They do exactly what it says on the tin. Responsible for 'Love is all around' being at number one for what felt like eight years. No, I won't link to them.

The Humphrey Shovel does not exist. But it should do.

Most of the bands mentioned in frame four are invented as well apart from Crispy Ambulance and Gnomefumbler. Crispy Ambulance were a Manchester act from the late 70s that I just liked the name of - I have no idea what they sound like. Gnomefumbler were the band I was in when I was at school. I say band, what I actually mean is four teenagers with more ideas than musical ability improvising in front of a cassette recorder, a strange mix of prog rock, silliness and musique concrete.

And then it all goes horribly uncool for Gemma. Bucks Fizz were the Eurovision winning song troupe constructed according to the Abba template of two girls and two boys. Desperately uncool, but also peerless early 80's pop of the kind that came smothered in very loud compressed drums. For example...

Dollar were very similar, produced by Trevor Horn (Frankie, Seal etc). They sang sugary sweet songs that turned out to be adaptations of J G Ballard short stories, like Videotheque.

Barry Manilow needs no introduction. Despite not writing "I write the songs" I have a lot of time for him.

James Last is one of those baffling phenomena that I can't explain. He's a German big band leader who produced an endless series of easy listening albums with names like Non Stop Dancing, Beachparty 3, Polka Party II, Non Stop Dancing 1973 and Super Non-Stop Dancing (all from 1972). He produced what he liked to call 'happy music', and it sounds exactly like you'd imagine.

The big day

So this is it. And its interesting to note that despite everyone wanting to wish the Royal couple all the very best, a note of melancholy has entered the comments. Recent history weighs heavily on this marriage.

Margaret and Anthony. Anne and Mark. Charles and Diana. Andrew and Fergie. We've been here before. The commemorative tea towels lasted longer than the marriages.

I don't want history to repeat itself. May this new generation have more sense than the preceding ones. And may the media give Kate more breathing space than they ever gave Diana.

Not very funny, but there you are. Normal slapstick resumes on Monday.

Middleton, Middleton, Middleton Pie

I checked GoComics this morning to make sure the strip had loaded into the system properly, and the following advert popped up underneath it...

Offcuts of Royal Couple served in a delicious puff pastry. Coming soon in the same range - Diana in a bun. Blee!

Indecision

I missed Charles and Diana's wedding. I was on the Isle of Arran off the west coast of Scotland where the TV signal was spotty at best, doing a Geography field trip with other A Level students from my school. I remember hiring a bike, cycling halfway around the island, and then coming back to measure pebble sizes in the burn in Glen Catacol.

Charles and Camilla's wedding was spent in a car showroom in Tunbridge Wells, Linda and I bought our Honda Jazz as the ceremony was taking place on monitors all over the sales floor.

Edward and Sophie's wedding was spent cycling through the Medway valley, waiting for the peal of church bells that would sound the all clear telling me it was safe to go home again.

This time round I intend to watch the wedding in Halfords in Brighton, buying a bicycle to replace the one that got stolen last year. After all, it's tradition isn't it?

Bag

A brown paper grocery bag of the kind that we don't use in the UK - we tend to go for plastic bags over here but I can't draw one of them in this situation.

Millie Week 13

Daily Mirror, Saturday 23 June 1990

Another strip set in a recognisable Catford Centre. In particular note the beautifully rendered bench the two girls are sitting on. I think after this we just went for a generic inner-suburban London look.

This sets up the strip's essential triangle of relationships. Millie of course, is unaffected by this. In most cartoons, the central character tends to be rather bland compared to the others that revolve around them*, and Millie was no exception. She provides the empty vessel that the reader identifies with and fills with their own personality.

* For example, compare Tintin with Captain Haddock, Asterix with Obelix, Charlie Brown with Snoopy and so on. The theory falls down in the case of Family Circle, where everyone is bland.

Revealed: Scrumpy's secret life

I've never officially named the miserable rabbit in this cartoon - he's usually just refereed to as 'that miserable rabbit'. Well, his real name is Scrumpy Jack and he's named after a real miserable rabbit that an ex-girlfriend of mine once had.

Scrumpy was a rescue rabbit, a huge white lop eared beast. He lived at a private all girls boarding school in the heart of the countryside, where my ex taught English. He got a lot of attention, was adored by all, and he was as miserable as sin.

My ex thought he might be lonely, so she got him a companion, Stella, a small dark vivacious bunny who was as sunny and lively as Scrumpy was miserable. Stella would bound around the hut they shared, while Scrumpy would remain motionless in the middle of the floor, willing everyone to go away. The addition of two guinea pigs to the menagerie, Malibu and Pineapple didn't help matters.

Then, one Christmas, I was asked to look after Scrumpy over the holidays. Scrumpy was given the run of my flat, and I discovered what gave him joy in life. Cholmondeley, Smudge's sister, an enormous sixteen pound British Blue, was terrified of Scrumpy. And boy, did Scrumpy know it. Scrumpy would chase Cholmondeley all around the flat until Cholmondeley hid on top of the wardrobe. He'd then wait for him until he came down...

Merry Easter everyone. Here in Britain we're starting a run of Bank Holidays. We have Good Friday, Easter Monday, The Blessed EventTM and May Day happening in quick succession. Have a great time, wherever you are.

Desperate Wedding tie-ins

Are you a cringing royalist and deaf as well? Scared you won't be able to hear the royal couple say 'One does' to one another? Then this is just the thing for you.

Got too many rabbits at your rescue centre? Just name two of them Wills and Kate and let local journalists desperate for stories with a royal angle give you as much free publicity as you need.

(Also note the ad underneath for the Charlton Athletic football team, advertising a fixture that had taken place three weeks previously. That tells you everything you need to know about the intelligence of footballists.)

Roofscape

This is one of my continuous background cartoons. It's a bit of a cheat this time as no characters are walking from frame to frame, but as it's essentially Smith sitting on a roof looking out over the Hastings skyline, the division of frames still works as a timing device.

This was taken from a photographic reference. One of the handy things about Hastings is that it's very hilly. Roads tend to follow contour lines, and it's perfectly possible to stand on one street and look down over the roofs of houses one block away. The other handy thing about Hastings is that it's riddled with twittens, footpaths and stairways - short cuts from one level of houses to the next.

Here's the photo the drawing above was based on.

It was taken from halfway up this flight of stairs on the West Hill, looking NW over the Ore Valley towards St Helens Woods (of which more will be seen in the summer) and the High Weald of Sussex. Of course this is nowhere near the post-war bit of town Smith and Jones actually reside in, but I wanted this strip to be a bit more interesting in its architecture. Therefore we can see the Victorian houses in the foreground, graduating to the gingerbread Edwardians in the middle distance and then the red roofed 1930s semis in the distance.

The photo was actually taken in February, so I've had to improvise the foliage.

Scary masks

Remember those Kate and Wills masks I mentioned in yesterday's post? See below, a photo from Sunday's London Marathon, scanned from Monday's 'i' newspaper. Are they sinister or what?

Also worth noting is the fact that, according to the story, Superman put in a time of 2:42:46, while Fred Flintstone managed 2:46:59. That's what years of propelling a car with your feet can do.

Z

I've been keeping away from the hype, avoiding tabloid newspapers and not watching ITV, but now it's starting to become unavoidable. The creepiest Royal Wedding souvenir I've seen so far is the Will and Kate masks. It wont be long before the Royal couple are caught on CCTV doing their first armed bank robbery...

Mike Pike Essipode 12

..and that's it for this adventure. With a second Scooby Doo reference we put Thurgermeyer away for a couple of weeks until his inevitable return in the Fangs of Sevenoaks.

The Angel Centre does look like that, an amorphous lump of brown brick and concrete from the early 80s, desperately trying to compensate for its bulk by having no architectural value whatsoever. The bit we see in the frame is the sports and leisure hall, with a bit of the department store and supermarket tacked onto it to make it profitable for the council visible to the right.

This sees the height of my obsessive crosshatched style. What I really wanted was Letratone to work with, so I could get regular dotted tones, but I couldn't afford it then.

The Fangs of Sevenoaks will begin posting in May, after we've got the upcoming rash of public holidays and weddings out of the way...

Millie week 12

 

Daily Mirror Saturday June 16th 1990

Not much to say about this one, apart from the fact I still do this when faced with one of those shakes that you need a suction pump to get started. And that the best shake in the world is the butterscotch one from Foxy's diner in Clovis NM.

Bunting

OK, here we go. Time to tackle the Blessed Union of The Two Most Fragrant and Radiant People in the Universe. Not that I'm particularly interested, you understand. Or that I'm particularly against it. But when an event becomes so over hyped that it becomes compulsory I tend to react against it, and that tends to be reflected in Smith's attitude.

Just for the record, I wish them well. I just worry for Kate. She's marrying into a problem family. They have previous when it comes to this sort of thing and if past events can be used to predict future trends, things do not look good for her. I can't help thinking she might be better off marrying into the Krays.

Day of the Seagull

One day I will write a horror book called 'Day of the Seagull'. Paperback only, published by New English Library, in a pre-thumbed edition that falls open at the most violent bits. A bit like those schlocky pulp novels like The Rats and Night of The Crabs that were so popular in the 70s. Though it must be said, this seagull looks a bit too friendly and gormless to be really frightening.

Mew!

It's time to bring Smudge and Chumley into the strip a bit more now. I'm being a bit unfair on the real Smudge here, but in our house she's definitely the cat that likes to rule the roost. She used to rule her brother with an iron claw, despite his being twice the size and having twice the strength of her. In the next couple of months we're going to see more of Smudge's sense of self importance and Chumley's gentle nature.

Mike Pike essipode 11

Wrotham, on top of the North Downs, the highest point in Kent, and the perfect place for the BBC to put it's main radio transmitter for the South East.

The radio in frame five was my own FM trannie - which I tended to draw as my default cartoon radio at the time. The default cartoon radio I draw nowadays in Smith is a Pure DAB radio. I don't own one, (mine is a seven year old Goodmans) but they're the most instantly recognisable radio type nowadays. And if anyone from Pure is reading this, I'm always open to offers for product placement.

Note that Alonzo's middle initial in the indroduction has mutated from an F to a P. Also note that his TRansit van has the words 'Mad Scientist' helpfully painted on the sides.

Thrilling conclusion next week, folks...

Millie Week 11

Daily Mirror: Saturday June 9th 1990

Millie was partly inspired by three teenage girls who had passed through the drama club I was with at the time. I called them the Three Sisters and was fascinated by the continually shifting power relationships between them - two of them would forever be conspiring against the other one, and it would be a different combination every week. It was always my intention to write the strip around a trio of girls, and with the introduction of Gemma I completed my main cast.

In these early days Roger and I were attempting to ground the strip in the real Catford in South East London. I would take the train up to Catford every few months and breathe in the ambience (mainly diesel fumes and abandoned kebabs to be honest), while Roger got a friend to take some photographic reference material (nowadays we have Google Street View). This strip, set in Catford's open air shopping centre was the first fruit of those researches.

The cat is the nearest thing Catford has to a landmark. It marks the gap in the buildings that leads to the open courtyard/run down strip mall that is the Catford Centre. It has a small WHSmith in it. That's all I can remember about it - I'm sure it has all the usual inner city outlets, small grocery stores, hairdressers, building societies and the obligatory dodgy mobile phone shop that will 'crack' your phone for a fiver, no questions asked.

Pop culture references:
Soul II Soul - still going, still rather wonderful, still a strange mixture of roots music and corporatism.
The Beloved - very early 90s, but with one sublime album to their name: 'Happiness'. The Sun Rising was one of the most glorious chill-out singles of the rave era ever. I'd link to it on YouTube but EMI, with all the net acumen that has led to their bankruptcy, has blocked it.
Neighbours and Home and Away were competing Australian soap operas - they were hugely popular but nothing ever happened in them. Brookside was a British soap, based in Liverpool, which was its diametric opposite; murder, arson, religious cults, lesbianism, nothing was off limits.
Marks and Sparks and Top Shop are mainstream fashion shops. M&S are smugly middle class, famed for sensible underwear and prawn sandwiches, while Top Shop is a trendy women's shop for the teens and twenties.

Note the round advertising display bollard in the background of the last frame. Based on the Parisian model, these have started cropping up all over the world. Champs Elysee, Paris; Market Street, San Francisco; Catford Centre, Catford. Not quite right is it?

Living on the Ceiling

This has been a bit of an odd week. Having come up with a week of static flavoured cartoons based on a comment left on the GoComics page, I've found the next day's joke telegraphed in the preceding day's comments page. That's the danger of having a vociferous audience of other cartoonists. We all tend to think in the same twisted way.

So: Let's see if anyone can guess what Monday's strip will be about...

Will it be:
a) sausages
b) Smudge's wall
c) Scrumpy
d) slugs

Answers on a postcard please...

Big blue Zot!

I don't normally use those intensely bright RGB colours that can't be reproduced in normal CMYK print - but this cartoon is an exception. I've used an unnatural blue and applied it with a noise brush to represent static electricity. And I think it works.

Zot!

I'd like to thank regular reader Tham Packs for unwittingly inspiring this week's set of cartoons. One of the wonderful things about the comments on GoComics is that some of them can send your mind spinning off in different directions. The comment was in relation to the set of cartoons where Jones explores the inside of a duvet cover (September 10 2010), and was simply 'don't forget the static electricity'. Leave a comment like that to marinate for six or seven months and this and the subsequent two cartoons are the result.

Mike Pike Essipode 10

How to get yourself out of a tight plot corner with the use of some totally unconvincing non-science. But, hey, look who gets to have a guest appearance as next door's cat. Yes, it is Smith, in possibly the only three frames ever drawn with him and a human being in the same frame. And he's not too pleased about it.

Next week, doom on 96.7 VHF, which was (and still may be for all I know) the frequency for BBC Radio Kent, though we now call it FM.

 

Millie Week 10

If the last week's cartoon wasn't based on experience, this one definitely is. I hated sports (or 'games' as it was officially called, in a effort to diminish the sadism and make it sound no more harmless than a game of Ludo) when I was at secondary school. Rugby during the autumn term, Hockey in the spring term and Cricket in the summer term. To this day I'm still not entirely sure of the rules of either of those sports - but to summarise:

Rugby is cold and wet and violent played on a muddy pitch with the consistency of soup.
Hockey is cold and wet and violent and played with weapons on a frozen pitch with the consistency of iron.
Cricket is boring, and you will get hit by a cricket ball in the nuts.

I became an expert at forgetting my kit. 

Eventually the teachers realised I wasn't cut out for team games and allowed me out to go cross country running instead. Well, they called it running - actually so long as we completed the course they set and checked in with the teacher at the most distant part of the course they didn't care how we did it.

April Fool

 

It's April Fool madness at Comics Sherpa, and Theresa Shepherd, the cartoonist who produces Snow Sez... emailed me to ask if I wanted to collaborate on something with her. This is what we came up with, with us guest drawing the first two frames of each other's strip, emailing ideas, scripts and Photoshop files to one another about two weeks before publication.

The top one is appearing on Smith's page, while the one underneath appears on Snow's page.

The removed heads are quite eerie aren't they?

The cartoon I had originally scheduled for today will be posted on July 1st instead.