Bus

I never ride buses. I think I see buses as a sort of admission of defeat that I couldn't be bothered to walk to my destination, so I never take them. Besides, you have to be either under fourteen or over sixty to be seen dead in one. Or one of those men of a certain age that take books of bus routes to bed with them at night.

Before one of those men writes in, I'd better admit now that the colour scheme of this bus is inaccurate. Hastings Arrows buses are a fetching blue white and orange. This bus has a fairly typical tasteless privatised colour scheme of teal and fuscha.

Bus pass

..and thus begins this year's first big summer storyline...

Actually the seafront is twenty minute's walk way, all downhill, but I'm allowing for little cat legs here.

Millie 22

Daily Mirror, Saturday August 25 1990.

This is where the story really starts. I'd been pestering the Daily Mirror to go daily for six months by this time. As far as they were concerned I was serving out a period of apprenticeship. They wanted to make sure that I could sustain the treadmill that a daily strip can become before entrusting one to me.

This strip, which is essentially an entire week's worth of strips distilled down into six single panels with a punchline in each one, was what finally persuaded them I was ready. Two weeks later Millie started appearing on a Monday-Saturday schedule.

The colour scheme in frame two effectively hides a vital bit of information for deciphering the joke. Obscured behind the red stripe on the brim of Gemma's hat are the words 'Kiss Me Quick', a traditional slogan found on hats sold at the coast. They don't appear anywhere inland. I don't know why. They don't sell rock-candy reproductions of full English breakfasts more that 100 yards away from the sea either. I feel a geography thesis coming on...

The Moo for England shirt Sammi is holding up was a reference that that year's must have fashion item  the Inspiral Carpets' 'Mad as Fuck' T-shirt with the picture of the mad cow on it.

Moo.

Feel the Dynamic Tension in frame four.

This was also the summer of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Hero Turtles, name-checked as an ice cream flavour in frame five. The country was in the grip of Turtlemania and the syndicated strip had started to appear in the Daily Mirror, and continued to appear for about a year until the fad blew itself out after a disappointing movie sequel. Note the name change, made after a tabloid scare story about five year old kids throwing nunchucks about. These unnecessary name changes happen occasionally. Top Cat became Boss Cat in the UK because his name was the same as a brand of cat food (though the theme song stayed exactly the same).

All the ice cream vans in Kent and Sussex come from a lair in Hastings. I know this because if I get stuck behind one on the way to work in Tunbridge Wells I usually end up arriving ten minutes late.

Glasto

Today's the first day of the 2011 Glastonbury Festival - three days of corporate sponsored peace, love and alternative music in a muddy field in Somerset. If the weather's being kind it can be fantastic. If it's not it tends to look like the scene you see here. And it looks like this year is going to be one of those years when it's going to be very very muddy. If you're going this year, good luck. Just sit in the first muddy puddle you find and remember that that will be the cleanest you feel all weekend.

To be honest it's much easier to watch the BBC's blanket coverage on the telly. That's what I'll be doing, unadventurous square sell-out that I am.

Smith the shred

This was Cholmondeley’s favourite trick - he loved to scratch at paper - the more important the better. My precious copy of 2000AD No 1 from 1977 (how geeky am I?) was destroyed by him a few years ago. His favourite stratching post was a pile of National Geographics - those yellow spines were so tempting. And don’t get me started on the subject of him and woodchip wallpaper.

There goes the sun

I like the colouring I did on this one - as the sky deepens and the sunlight reflected off Smith and Jones gradually reddens from frame to frame. Just one problem. The dialogue says that the sun has already set. Ooops. Let's pretend we haven't noticed, shall we?

Millie 21

Daily Mirror, August 18th 1990.

I was working to a six week deadline at the Daily Mirror, so this means that this would have been written as that year's Wimbledon was coming to an end.

Escalation

This is the end of this sequence, but not the end of this theme. Smudge's competitiveness will resurface from time to time.

Here we see Smudge's wall in context for the first time. It's a garden wall separating Smith and Jones' post war dwelling from the Victorian semis on the other side of the divide - not unlike the view outside my own living room to be honest, except in my case there's a small stream and a thicket of trees between my house and the garden opposite.

The church is a transplant from Tunbridge Wells. It's St Mark's C of E Church in Broadwater Down - I picked it because it has a very tall steeple. The churches in Hastings tend to be much older and stumpier, with low towers rather than steeples, and that would have ruined the joke.

The final think to note today is that if subscription rates keep rising at the rate they have been for the past couple of weeks both Snow Sez and Smith will probably break the 400 subscriber barrier on GoComics. As of now (12.20am) we're both at 396 subscribers... Not that I'm counting of course.

King of the Castle

When I was a kid we used to have a house which was more stairway than room. It was a mid victorian terrace set into the side of a hill, and the back half of the house was half a level down from the front half. Depending on how you looked at it, it either had six or three floors. There was a small window set into the wall at the top of the stairway, completely inaccessible from inside or outside the house. Except to one white fluffy cat, who could somehow manage to leap down from the roof onto the narrow window ledge six (or three) storeys up and then stare in through the window at us. No-one knows how he did it, but we seemed to be his favourite form of entertainment. Maybe he had a crush on our own cat, Sunday.

Chumley's obviously been taking lessons from that cat.

The bookcase Smudge is sitting on, in mine. It's from Ikea and is probably called 'Lundqvist'. The lampshade definitely isn't - it's probably available at the Bexhill Help The Aged charity store and called 'Doris'.

Status

When I first drew Smith in the 80s I never drew the whiskers onto the cats but I've added them in for this run. Every now and again my mind slips and the whiskers get left off. Sometimes I notice and add them in post production, when I'm doing the colouring. Sometimes I only notice a month after I've uploaded the strip to GoComics and I'm doing the blog. This is one of those times.

Thanks to Desmond Morris and his book 'Catwatching' for the seed that grew into the theme for this week's strips

Millie week 20

I used a variation of this joke last year on Smith.

Hey, it's my joke. I can recycle it as many times as I like!

Friction burns

I don't know how some people just stick to the same number of panels in every strip they do - the standard issue of three or four never seems to be enough. I've found myself doing a lot of six and seven panel ones lately - they're more work but I think they're worth it.

Shed!

Our carpet is about 25% cat hair, I reckon, and that's despite owning a Vax super sucky pet hair destroying vacuum cleaner. It's not as bad as it used to be - Cholmondeley was a cat who had more fur than surface area to grow it on, so he used to shed prostigious amounts of blue hair every time he moved.

The vanishing gull

If this was inspired by anything it would be those moments in Tom and Jerry Cartoons where Tom would think something was behind him, but could never look behind him quick enough to see Jerry with a baseball bat/frying pan/grandfather clock ready to bash him. Imagine music between each frame going diddle diddle dee, as Smudge changes position.

Millie week 19

Daily Mirror, August 4 1990

Here's a period piece. 1990 was the year of Madchester and 'Baggy' - possibly the last time pop music ever came up with anything new and interesting - everything since has merely been a machine processed pastiche of what has come before. (Headline: Grumpy middle aged cartoonist declared modern pop music stagnant shock!)

The ecstacy-fuelled second summer of love had managed to drag on for a third year, left the fields around the M25 and had now gone mainstream in the pubs and clubs of provincial Britain, to the point where even The Daily Mirror had taken notice of rave culture. The costume Richard is wearing is actually a toned down version of the stuff one of the print apprentices at the branch of Kall-Kwik printing I was working at was wearing at the time - the trousers in particular are a perfect reproduction.

Fractals at the time were seen as a gateway to enlightenment. Today, of course, we use them to generate CGI explosions in Hollywood movies.

Phone-in

Self explanatory, and a rewrite of one of my old ones from 1982, a time when I was addicted to the late night phone-ins on LBC, London's commercial news radio station. Note the telephone, a late 80s push button BT Tribune - once again I've opted to draw a phone that looks like a phone rather than the anonymous white cordless box it would normally be these days.

Thank you to all the Comics.com refugees who have subscribed to the strip. I've gained an extra 60 subscribers in the last 36 hours, and It's great to see that lots of other Sherpa artists have seen their readership rise by similar amounts.

Feinites Barley!

Memories of the playground at St Peter's Church of England Primary School, Tunbridge Wells, inspired this one. Some little herbert would always attack you with the pinching and punching routine on the first of every month, protecting himself with the incantation 'and no returns' immediately after. Of course you'd ignore that and get your punch and kick back, and it would escalate from there into all out war.

I've never seen Bart Simpson do this, and you can usually rely on Matt Groening to remember all the playground lore there is and use it in either The Simpsons or his Life in Hell cartoons. Is this a particularly British thing?

This was originally meant to run on April 1st, but the switcheroo with Snow Sez took priority over it so this cartoon was bumped to today. That's why this is numbered 196 instead of 222 - it's running out of sequence.

Today is also the first day of GoComics merger with Comics.com. I'd like to welcome all the new readers who have found themselves unceremoniously shunted onto this strange new site with the unfamiliar navigation. It'll make sense once you get used to it, I promise, and GoComics are slowly but surely curing all the glitches - it broke down two weeks ago but it's almost back to its old functionality, and the Sherpa strips have returned to the email feed so at least I can be sure that everyone that does sign up for the strip now actually receives it.

If you're overwhelmed by the enormous choice of admittedly wildly variable material on Sherpa can I recommend the following:

Snow Sez by T Shephard (currently dormant but due to relaunch on June 6th. Every strip is a gem.)
In The Sandbox by Vicki Jackoby (also currently dormant but flares into joyous life every now and again)
Zootopia by Mike Wilson (consistently funny, as was his previous strip The Divine Comedy)
Glenview Revue by Rene Lopez (for his ability to suggest voluptuous roundness with the simplest of lines)
Featherweight by Chris Mountjoy (Funny and a truly luminous colour palette that makes every panel look like it's lit from behind)
Sooky Rottweiler by 'Cynthia' (A quirkily drawn animal strip from a unique French Canadian perspective)
Police Limit by Garey McKee (From the opposite side of the political spectrum to me but well written, beautifully drawn and cogently argued - you can't help but sympathise with Officer Pig.)

If you're a Sherpa cartoonist and you're not on this list don't be downhearted - there's lots of other great stuff on there but too much to take in in one go. If you have the time also try Mad Mouse, Frank and Steinway, Oranges are Funny, Wendle's Life, The Willies, Whisky Falls, Beardo, Mary B Wary, Devin Crane, 0-60, The House of Uncommons and Ten Cats - strips as different from one another as cheese is to a Kraft Single. I'll give them all one line reviews in another post a little later...