Wimbledon

Originally published 21 June 2010

Real sport at last! Wimbledon I can cope with, it only lasts for two weeks and it doesn't try to monopolise your attention in the same relentlessly needy way that football does. However, it does have an unfortunate meteorological effect - it causes rain to fall in the same way that rain dances and barbecues do.

Bang!

Originally published 18 June 2010

The ball depicted is the official 2010 World Cup ball manufactured by whoever it was that made the ball, and used at wherever the 2010 World cup was played at. South Africa, I think. It was the one with the tuneless vuvuzelas, wasn't it? Now that's the kind of musical instrument only a football fan could love - a loud and annoying one that only plays one note.

Incidentally, tonight is the first night of this… I'll be playing Nicely Nicely Johnson for the next few days.

Meet the fans

Originally published 16 June 2010

Football fans. Easily led, eternally hopeful, not very clever. In short: dogs.

There is no escape

Originally published 14 June 2010

None, do you hear me? None.

Names

This year's halloween cartoon is another one inspired by that wierd cat calendar on my desk at work. This is one of those facts that the calendar throws at you, but worded in such a peculair way that this was the first thing I thought of. I think what they mean is that cats have the power to see ghosts, rather than identify them.

So, who are the cats Jones mentions in this strip?

Humphrey - the Downing Street cat, chief mouser under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Named after Sir Humphrey Appleby, the leading civil servant in the TV series "Yes, Minister".

Skimbleshanks - the railway cat, from TS Eliot's, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. You'll find him in act II of the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical.

Custard - a pink cat who lived next door to a green dog called Roobarb. Appeared in a show with the best theme tune ever.

Thomas - the full name of Tom, the antihero of the Tom and Jerry cartoons, though only the housekeeper ever called him that.

Mr Jinks - a later Hanna Barbera cat, this one starred with two mice called Pixie and Dixie. Mr Jinks and Pixie wore bow ties, while Dixie had a waistcoat. Why?

Prudence Kitten - a forgotten British Children's TV puppet from the 1950s. It predates me but I remember my sister having a Prudence Kitten book. She was a glove puppet of a kitten who wore a voluminous flowery dress, and I think she was a spin off from the Muffin the Mule show.

Felix - a black and white cartoon cat from the silent movies. (This ones from 1919).

Angus - an eccentric persian domestic cat from the movie 'Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging', a British teen movie filmed down the road in Eastbourne and Brighton. Recommended.

Michael - of What's Michael by Makoto Kobayashi, the best cat comic ever.

Day one

Originally published 11 June 2010

The premise to this strip was that for the past few months we would have been bombarded with endless non-stop hype about the upcoming world cup. And now we were sick to the back teeth with it, it finally started.

Smith does not sponsor the England team

Originally published 9 June 2010

Why should I waste my money on sponsoring a team that will inevitably get knocked out in the quarter finals by Germany? England logos start appearing on products in the months  leading up to the World Cup. In a world where there is too much choice, I find it helps me make purchasing decisions in supermarkets much quicker - I simply disregard anything with a World Cup logo printed on it.

World Cup

Originally published 7 June 2010

I'm not a fan of football (or soccer, as it is called by nations that use that name for another game that doesn't use anything that could logically be designated a ball, or indeed use feet much). I've tried sitting through a game from start to finish, but I've never managed to stay awake all the way through.

Heaven knows I've tried. When I was a kid I had cousins who were devoted to Chelsea, and I tried to join in, but it seemed to involve wearing blue a lot and singing witless songs about the colour blue. The violence at the games in the 70s weren't much of a plus point either. And the tribalism drove me mad. You could guarantee that if ever a tough kid came up you you in the street and asked you what football team you supported, whatever you gave as an answer it would be wrong and you'd be duffed up.

I accidentally got involved in the football fanzine scene in the late 80s, designing a grass roots Tottenham Hotspur supporter's magazine called The Spur. This showed me the other side of the coin, it was possible to be a liberal human being and a football fan, with your team being the centre of an open minded community rather than a hostile tribe. While I was there, we campaigned against the destruction of a much loved football stand, the Shelf, against the increasing commercialisation of the game as Tottenham morphed from a football team to into an impersonal PLC, excoriated racism and thuggery, tried to make sense of the horrific Hillsborough tragedy, and paid tribute to Gary Lineker and Paul 'Gazza' Gascoigne in their glory years. And still the game was as dull as ditchwater to me.

I have such little interest in football that when I was once approached by a very nice man in an Arsenal shirt at an exhibition where I was participating in drawing a comic for charity who told me how much he liked my drawing, I had no idea who he was. My awestruck companions had to explain to me afterwards that he was Ian Wright, the legendary Arsenal and England striker. You can gauge how little this meant to me by the fact that I've just had to look up his name on Wikipedia.

Once every four years, the World Cup happens. It completely takes over every single form of media in the country for a month and the only way to escape it is to move to the USA for the duration.  There is a good chance that that's where you'll find me between 12 June and 13 July next year, as for some reason every other country on the planet is fascinated by the game as well.

Evel Kinevel

Originally published 4 June 2010

Evel Kinevel would have managed this, but he never had Smudge to counted with. One for all those of you who like to collect my cartoons with continuous backgrounds.

Unicycle

Originally published 2 June 2010

I've been repeating what is essentially the same joke for the last few days, but upping the ludicrousness each time. This is as far as it goes - though I suppose I could have added one with Jones on a penny farthing…

Zwish

First published 31 May 2010

There was a short period at the beginning of the century when you would see grown adults zooming about the pavements on micro wheeled scooters. Places with a large nerd populations like San Francisco and Shoreditch used to be infested with them. Eventually they fed through to the general populaces, and got used a few times until it was obvious they were useless for getting over hills or kerbs and could be stopped by something as simple s a pine cone. Then they were relegated to the backs of garden sheds or dusty corners of balconies (where ours resides) until they were discovered by curious Siamese cats…

Shred from cover to cover

I no longer religiously buy a Sunday paper, but I'll occasionally succumb to the Sunday Times or the Sunday Post. When I was a kid we would get The Observer, and Dad would never let anyone read any of the paper's many sections until he'd read them first.

Competition

First published 28 May 2010

Talking point for today. Is it necessary to be best at what you do, or just to be as good as you can be? And if you do turn out to be one of those lucky people who has a talent for something, do you have to be such a knob about it?

Triumph

First published 26 May 2010

This is was based on my first experience of rollerblades. The elation when I realised i could roll around on a flat surface without falling over. The despair when I realised that nowhere in the real world was actually flat.

Skateboard

First published 24 May 2010

The next two month's worth of strips were written in the Java Loft, Clovis, NM, during the Christmas holidays. It's a comfortable place, with wifi, comfortable sofas and a great line in gingerbread Chai. It's also a great place to work with no distractions. I don't get to go there very often, but a disproportionately large number of strips get written here - usually a set of summer strips written over the Christmas period. This year I'll be there for Thanksgiving, ands I aim to get a lot of this spring's strips written there.

For the record, no I can't balance on a skateboard either. But I'm a big fan of rollerblades.

How to end a sequence

First published 21 May 2010

This was to became the default ending for a lot of my extended story lines beaded on one of the cats having a delusion of some sort. Eventually the cats delusion would lead them to think they could sit on Smudges' wall, and Smudge would wallop some sense back into them. I now try my best to come up with a different ending, but it tempting, and besides, it's one of the things that defines the strip. After all, the Doctor's sonic screwdriver is a similar 'get out of a situation easily' device, but you'd be disappointed if he didn't use it at least once in an episode of Doctor Who.

An imperceptible speck floating unnoticed in the void of eternity

Note Scrumpy's smile in the last panel. Is he really as miserable as he says he is, or is he just mucking about with people's minds?

Ur Buzza Wuzza

first published 17 May 2010

This strip strikes me as pure Buzza Wuzza, If you haven't seen him before, he's a loosely drawn yellow cat who lives out his life on a beach with his friend, Riggs the red cat, his pal, Pal, an alien called Dr Guam, a host, and a single solitary spiky bush. Looming behind them all, manipulating their moods and controlling their destinies is a mysterious entity only known as The Sea Wall. He popped up on Sherpa earlier this year and he's quickly found an appreciative audience, drawn to to uniqueness and completeness of its vision. Nothing and everything happens - it is like a mixture of Waiting for Godot and Lost populated by funny animals. External influences very rarely intrude on Buzza's little universe - though occasionally a girl cat appears called Judy Moon. Nothing is explained, but everything makes sense in its own strange way.

This strip strikes me as the kind of thing that would happen in Buzza Wuzza., only the characters would then worry about the philosophical ramifications of invisibility for the next few days.  Jones' pose in frame two is also very Buzza - only with more realistically proportioned forelimbs.

The mirror act

Based on an hoary old music hall routine.  I may get the cats to do more old music hall gags in the future. Now, how do I get Smith and Jones to do a Wilson, Keppel and Betty sand dance routine? (It starts at 0:20).

Teel hee!

Originally published May 14, 2010

"Tee hee"? How Beano can you get? Every now and then the influence of those old DC Thompson comics I used to read as a kid comes back and makes its presence known.

Four panels

Originally published May 12, 2010

When I was a kid, and my interest in cartooning was becoming apparent, I remember my Mum and an auntie (I don't remember which - I have more aunts than a book by PG Wodehouse) talking about cartoons and whether there was any future in it. The comment that stays with me to this day came from the aunt: "Well, I think its clever. Have you ever noticed the way the stories always stop exactly at the end of the page? How do they do that?"

It's not as dumb a question as it first appears to be. There are some comics, Garfield being one, that have a rigid format that has to be stuck to at all times. This gag wouldn't work in Garfield, it has to be paced at four panels. You can't lose a panel without losing the premise, the set up, Smith's reaction, or the punchline. 1 and 2 could possibly be melded together but the timing would go all skewiff.

I have a space to fill. The strip ends when the gag is delivered on the right hand side of the space. Other than that, everything is up for grabs, I can have as many or as few panels as I like. I revel in that freedom. And I've been really enjoying doing the Sunday strips - when I return to doing the dailies in the new year I think I may do some Sundays as well.

The real question is, how does the Jim Davies organisation manage to churn out so many gags with just three frames (middle one borderless) in them?

Cheshire Cat

Originally published May 10, 2010

This was based on an original strip I did back in 1982. In it, a cat called Perdi, who doesn't appear in the modern version (Smudge takes her place in the strip's ecosystem of gags), was seen grinning like Jones does in panel 3. She repeated the same pose for two panels, with gradually more and more beads of sweat radiating from her. In the last panel she thinks "I don't understand this. Maybe you have to come from Cheshire for it to work". I took the premise and twisted it in a completely different direction for this storyline.

Back to the storyline

Originally published May 7, 2010

This firmly establishes the gulls as being at the top of the pecking order in this strip, mainly because of their ability to peck.

Election

Originally published May 6, 2010

Another extra, published on the Thursday of the last general election - the one no-one won. Originally a Millie strip, recast as a Smith cartoon as my perception that no-one voted positively for anything any more has grown stronger over the years. Though to a certain extent that because no-one says anything positive we can believe in any more either. Ed Milliband is currently making an attempt at creating policies that might do some good for the ordinary British voter without going all populist and appealing to our baser instincts, but even then no-one believes that he'll follow through if he gets into power. Expect to see this strip run again in May 2015.

Set up

Originally published May 5, 2010

So who is kidding who here?

Trampette

I was checking Google Earth around my neighbourhood, you know, the way you do because its easier than climbing over the walls of neighbour's gardens. And I found that many of the gardens in the bigger houses had identical black circles in them. It took me a while to realise that these were abandoned trampettes, those miniature trampolines usually bought to back up a well-meaning new years resolution to keep fit, used for a month and then abandoned and left to rust at the bottom of the garden by around Easter. Obviously, the cats' garden couldn't be complete without one.

Chumley

Originally published 3 May 2010

And here's the first appearance of Chumley, Smudge's brother. He's a gentle giant, simple in the best way, totally without side or guile. It's like he was never given the manual on how to be a cat, and Smudge has to teach him. But Chumley won't learn. Like his real-life counterpart did, Chumley lives his life with his claws perpetually sheathed - there's really no need to act like a bruiser when you're his size.

The other side of the wall

Originally published 30 April 2010

It's never been explained what the wall is doing in Smith's garden. I rationalise that once upon a time there was a big Victorian house with a big perimeter war, but it got bombed in an incendiary attack during the war. After the war, the house and its grounds were razed and Smith's housing estate got built on top of it, planned with a big communal garden in a typically optimistic post-war sort of way. Somehow, the wall survived all this, and it has been jealously guarded by generations of British Blue cats ever since, the most recent one of which is Smudge.

Actually, it's a transplant from Tunbridge Wells. This was the wall that divided the front gardens of the houses two doors away from me - and you would always find a cat called Perdi sitting on it. It's another hangover from those stories Eric and I made up when we were kids.

Lucy's football

Originally published 28 April 2010

It has been pointed out that Smudge's wall is Smith's equivalent of Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy's football. And yes, I'll go along with that - though I do allow Smudge to be the fall guy occasionally.

Introducing Smudge

Originally Published 26 April 2010

Here's the prototype Smudge. along with the first appearance of her wall. Smudge in this strip still sports the smudge of blue on her nose which gave her her name - but that was removed after a few strips to give her face more clarity. You'll notice I've also carefully drawn in where the blue bits of her coat start and finish, which is why she looks a bit strange.

St Georges Day

Originally published 23 April 2010

The odd thing about St Georges Day is that if you asked an Englishman what day it was on, nine times out of ten they wouldn't be able to answer you. The Welsh, the Scots and the Irish make a great deal of noise about their national saints days, but the English never do, apart from a few ultra-nationalist nutters in the English Defence League and their tweedier brethren in UKIP who want to make celebrating it compulsory. I like to think that it means we're secure enough in our nationhood not to need to cling to symbols like St George any more. (Besides, St George was Palestinian, and we share his patronage with Egypt, Bulgaria, Russia, Romania, Greece, India, Iraq, Israel, Portugal, Ethiopia, Lithuania, Serbia, the Ukraine, and, of course, Georgia.)