The first strip

Originally published 1 January 2010

The story so far…

Smith was my second strip on Comics Sherpa. The first, Riverfields, was about a shopping mall, and it sort of fizzled out as the Credit Crunch hit, and I started to get annoyed with the human characters. After a break of about a year or so, I returned to my drawing board and resurrected some characters I'd drawn when I was at school, Smith and Jones.

It looks bit different doesn't it? As an experiment I drew this strip with an Italic Berol marker. I never used that pen again - the lines were too thick. You'll also notice that Jones has had the pints on her face shaded with black pen - a hangover from the strips I did when I was a kid, when everything had to be black and white. I immediately realised this wasn't necessary - and I could colour in Jones's points afterwards.

To start off with the strip was just Smith and Jones. I know I had other characters to introduce, but I was going to wait till Easter before I started introducing them. First of all Smith and Jones had to be established, with Smith as the dignified one and Jones as the clown forever puncturing his pomposity - a classic double act in other words.

When this site gets redesigned at the end of the year I'll repost all the Riverfields strips in their own section.

Technical note: These early strips are all at 600 pixels across - these date from before the blog so I had no reason to save them at the higher resolution.