Heights

Originally published 18 August 2010

I’m not scared of heights. However, when I’m at the top of something, depths terrify me.

Bush climbing

Originally published 16 August 2010

The start of a new story about cats clubbing trees. This strip, a sort of prelude to the story is actually based on Cholmondeley’s favourite sport, hedge climbing. There was nothing he loved more than to climb a hedge from the inside. He’d dive under the hedge, and then we’d watch the hedge rustle for a few minutes as he navigated his way up the dense thicket of foliage inside. Eventually a head would suddenly emerge from the top of the hedge. Cholmondeley had conquered the hedge.

Now, have you ever tried to retrieve a cat from the middle of a hedge? It’s actually harder than trying to get one out of a tree.

Friday the 13th, Part 1

Originally published 13 August 2010

The first of the Friday 13th gags, where something different is deliberately done wrong to the strip each time. This was a fairly simple deliberate mistake, with the panels placed in the order 3 - 2 - 4 - 1. Later versions would involve image inversions, PhotoShop filters and even animations…

That shirt looks familiar

Originally published 11 August 2010

Yes, it is a Charlie Brown shirt. It could even be his - after all Smith and Jones romp around in the same kind of open-plan Levittown landscape that the Peanuts gang used to in the early strips of the 1950s.

Clumsy

Originally published 6 August 2010

Cholmondeley always was a clumsy cat, so I gave him the same trait in the cartoon. The clumsiness gene was soon passed on to Smith, however, as I concentrated on making Chumley a placid and trusting gentle giant, to contrast with his sister Smudge.

Watch the birdie

Originally published 6 August 2010

A rewrite of an old strip from the 1980s, which had Perdi (Smudge’s predecessor) install one of those old fashioned dome shaped security cameras of the kind that used to be installed in department stores. You don’t see those about any more - or maybe we’ve become so used to them they’ve become invisible, which is a bit of a sobering thought.

“Wonderful chap. All of them.”

Originally published 2 August 2010

Quotation from Brigadier Alexander Lethbridge-Stewart, in the 20th Anniversary special: “The Five Doctors”.

The big day was yesterday, so here’s  my tribute to Doctor Who. Here are all eleven main incarnations so far of the Doctor, interpreted as cats. For the latecomers to the party (hello, America) they are William Hartnell (1963-66), Patrick Troughton (1966-69), Jon Pertwee (1970-74), Tom Baker (1974-81), Peter Davison (1981-84), Colin Baker (1984-86), Sylvester McCoy (1987-89, 1996), Paul McGann (1996), Christopher Eccleston (2005), David Tenant (2005-10), Matt Smith (2010-2013). I’ve not included Pater Capadi as he won’t be the Doctor till Christmas Day. I’ve also left out Peter Cushing’s movie Doctor, Richard E Grant’s animated Doctor, and the Valeyard, a curdled version of future Doctor only ever seen in the Colin Baker story “the Trial of a Time Lord”. John Hurt’s 'War Doctor' has also been left out because at the time of writing (early November) we don’t know where he fits into the Doctors timeline. Is he Doctor 8 towards the end of that incarnation, Doctor 9 before he shaved his head to become Christopher Eccleston, or a hitherto unknown incarnation the Doctor can’t admit to himself ever happened?

The  caricatures I’m happiest with are the ones of Tom Baker (“all teeth and curls” as he used to say), Colin Baker (alien and wonderfully self-satisfied), and Chris Eccleston (“Fantastic!”). And of course, I couldn’t draw Matt Smith without his Fez. He wears a fez now. Fezzes are cool.

The first two Doctors are, of course, in black and white.

GATSO

Originally published 4 August 2010

That’s a Gatso camera you’re looking at there - one of the many speed cameras that infest Britain’s roads. If they actually did their job, reduced speeds and kept the roads are I wouldn’t have problem with them. Unfortunately they only cause cars to slow down in the direct vicinity of a camera, and the sudden braking an encounter with an unexpected camera tends to cause more accidents than the speeding the cameras are supposed to stop. To add to their ineffectiveness, they have to be signposted with warning signs well in advance, and because of austerity cuts, a fair proportion of them are now empty shells with no camera inside.

The word Gatso isn’t an acronym, even though it sounds like one. It’s actually made after its inventor, the Dutch rally driver Maurice Gatsonides, who made the first one so he could measure himself driving round corners and develop the prefect racing line. So they were first developed to help increase vehicle speeds.

Mantelpiece

Originally published 2 August 2010

This is very much based on my own mantelpiece - minus the ugly clock/golfing trophy. Based on Smudge’s ability to thread her way through a crowded mantelpiece without disturbing anything at all, a skill that so far totally eludes Billy and Bella.

It was 50 years ago, today

Originally published 30 July 2010

There are a lot of important 50th anniversaries coming up over the next few days. Tomorrow we commemorate the 50th anniversary of three momentous deaths, President Jack Kennedy, Narnia creator C S Lewis, and writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley. The day after that, Doctor Who celebrates its 50th birthday.

Today, however, as a sort of warm up, we have another one. I am 50 years old today. I’ll be spending most of it travelling. Yes, it’s time for another trip to New Mexico, to spend Thanksgiving with Linda’s folks. It’s not as onerous a trip as you’d think, I genuinely enjoy travelling, and being such a short-arse, I am actually able to fit comfortably into an economy class seat on a transatlantic aircraft.

I’m flying courtesy of those very nice people at Delta, if any of their employees read this and want to give me an upgrade.

For reasons that leave me totally baffled, it’s £100 per person cheaper for us to fly into Albuquerque’s glorious sunport that Lubbock’s bus station of the air. So our itinerary today is Hastings - Heathrow - Atlanta - Albuquerque, Clovis NM.

It’s not too bad. At least my birthday will last 29 hours, instead of the usual 24. And there’s the chance of a really good celebratory Mexican meal at Sadie’s at the far end.

I won’t be out of touch. I’ll be checking my comments regularly on my tablet, and making updates via the comments go GoComics and Facebook. (Look me up under my name - I’m the one in Hastings, Sussex UK, and mention Smith so I recognise you). And I’ll be doing my usual trick of holing myself up in the Java Loft, Clovis, overdosing on caffeine and writing six months of strips while being swallowed up by one of their sofas.

As for the strip? I took a phrase and interpreted it literally. End of story.

Against animal testing

Originally published 28 July 2010

Inspired by watching makeover shows, and makeover features in women’s magazines, and thinking that the subject of the makeover invariably looked better before the experts went to work on them. Honestly, look at a cat’s face and you’re looking at perfection - you can’t improve on that.

Scratch post

Originally published 27 July 2010

Anyone with cats knows what this is all about.

Bin bags

Originally published 26 July 2010

Around this time I was commuting to work by train. Hastings early in the morning is not a pretty sight - those first few hours before the clean-up squads get to work belong to the seagulls, and there’s nothing they enjoy more than tearing apart a bin bag to get at the tasty morsels inside.

The dustbins are a bit of shorthand scene setting - they’re based on the ones Top Cat and his gang used to live in. There are no real dustbins in Hastings, everyone has been forced to use Wheelybins instead, something which explains the preponderance of bin bags and the resulting very fat seagulls in the town.

Shed

Another strip based on a snippet of information from the cat calendar at work. It was of course, accompanied by an image of one of those hairless Sphynx cats.

I’ve noticed Billy and Bella don’t shed as much as Smudge and Cholmondeley used to, but when they do shed it shows up on the carpet so much more because we have light coloured carpets and they have black fur. You can tell where their favourite spots are in the days leading up to a vacuuming...

Pffffffff

Originally published 23 July 2010

The inevitable end to this story. Forensic cartoon style anoraks will note that my rendering of the sea is pure Hergé.

Direction

Originally published 21 July 2010

Maybe if Jones had been facing backwards she’d have more control over that ball. Think about it, in order to go in one direction, Jones would need to be facing the other way. It’s an elementary mistake, but one that Rory in The Barn made as well.

Is this one of mine?

Originally published 19 July 2010

The next three strips were based on ones I originally did in the 1980s. At the time I was just doing the strips for my own pleasure and I didn’t have any qualms about nicking other people’s jokes, after all my audience at the time was just the other people at school. I’ve taken especial care when  reusing these old gags to make sure none of the steals have been repeated.

But in the case of this one, I don’t know if this was a borrowing or not? I know it was based on an old Peanuts cartoon of Snoopy trying to stand on top of a beach ball, and, having succeeded, not being able to get off it again. But something has been nagging at me. I can’t be sure that this development from that simple idea was actually my own. I’ve done extensive research but I can’t find anything similar to this in the work of Schulz or anyone else so I think it’s clean.

If it’s been nicked from anyone else, I apologise profusely. If it hasn’t, enjoy.

(Incidentally since this strip appeared on Comics Sherpa, I’ve seen Rory the lamb in Ralph Hagen’s strip ‘The Barn’ travel around on a beach ball. That makes me feel a bit better.)

Photographic reference

Originally published 16 July 2010

Discouraged by how the previous strip had turned out I went to Hastings beach and took some photos. That led to this, one of my most successful continuous backgrounds. It’s obviously traced over a photograph - this strip involves perspective - something I can normally never be bothered to deal with.

Here’s the photo.

The tall black garden shed things to the extreme left are net shops - structures unique to Hastings. The town never used to have a beach, but when the first groynes (the wooden fences that divide the beach up into sections and help control longshore drift, Smith’s sitting on one in yesterday’s strip) were built in the early 19th century, a tiny bit of beach suddenly appeared, and the fishermen built huts on this new strip of land in which to dry their nets. There wasn’t much room and there were lot of fishermen, each one was only allowed an area of beach of around nine square feet, so the huts went multi-storey. The beach has since grown around the huts but the huts have stayed as they were.

Hastings doesn’t have a harbour, so the boats are launched from the beach, and hauled up and down to the shoreline by tractors.

The cliff is to the proper scale this time.

Catsan

Originally published 14 July 2010

The background’s a bit unsuccessful here - it was an attempt to show the sandstone cliffs at Hastings, but it was done without any photographic reference, so it’s ended up looking all wrong. Those cliffs should be at least 60 feet high - but they look more like the banks of a dried up river.

Meet the beach

Originally published 12 July 2010

Some cats and a beach. All I need now is a balding bloke in a bow tie and I would have had the premise to Buzza Wuzza, but no, I missed that chance and decided to start in a ghost and blue quadrilateral doctor-free universe.

The strip is set in my home town of Hastings, and Hastings has a beach (though we don’t like to tell anyone it’s entirely made out to pebbles until they have made the journey here), so it would be a waste not to use it. . So once a year Smith and Jones make the mile-long trek to the sea.

I think at this point we have a generic beach, hence the sand - the strip would gradually become more geographically accurate as the story went on.

In strict tempo

The music Jones is playing in frame one is Scott Joplin's 'The Entertainer', true to her roots in boogie woogie and ragtime. In the last frame she's playing Bach's 'Well Tempered Clavier'.

The World Cup Final, 2010

Originally published 9 July

A rewrite of one of my original strips from 1982, where the subject Smith was avoiding was the Royal Wedding between Charles and Diana. That turned out well, didn’t it?

Spain won, apparently. I just had to look it up. It was that memorable to me. England, as ever, got thrashed by Germany 4-1, not even getting to the quarter finals.

As I write, the England team has somehow managed to scrape into the finals again, to be played next summer in Brazil. So we have the usual cycle of hype, bragging, false hope and inevitable disappointment to look forward to again…

Fall

Originally published 7 July

The relentless cycling of the seasons is a theme that I keep returning to, something that was especially true in this first year. This was published on the 9th of July, so we’d just passed over the hump of the year, and the nights were very slowly starting to draw in. There are some people who can’t just live in the moment though - the dog days of high summer are just a harbinger of the chill winds of winter to cone. Some people call it Autumn, other just see the Fall.

Bubblegum

Originally published 5 July

This is why you never see a cat chewing bubblegum. Obviously. The colour schemes were improving at this point. I was marrying the background with the main accent colour, in this case a minty green to go with the Pepto-Bismol pink.

Heccilopter

Originally published 2 July 2010

Putting Smudge’s powerful swipe to other uses.

Hnuergh!

Originally published 30 June 2010

Did players make those noises when I was I child? I don’t honestly remember, but that’s a mainly because I was usually upstairs in my bedroom for the entire duration of Wimbledon fortnight. My mum was addicted to Wimbledon, and would spend the entire two week period closeted in a darkened front room, avidly watching the tennis. Every now and then I would hear a scream and come running down the starers to find out what was wrong - it usually meant Jimmy Connors had lost an easy point or Virginia Wade had tripped over or something like that.

Claws in

Originally published 28 June 2010

Continuing with the Wimbledon Swingball theme. I like the drawing of Jones in the last panel in this one.

Autumn

Actually, the leaves are still on the trees at the moment, something which is particularly amazing considering the storm that blew through here last week.

Sorry this went up a bit late - I've had a bit of a hectic few weeks and I've now got some serious catching up to do with the cartoon.

This what I've been up to... Guys and Dolls with The Hastleons at the White Rock Theatre, Hastings.

I'm the one on the right playing Nicely Nicely Johnson, along with Chris Eyre as Benny Southstreet (left) and Rick Baker as Nathan Detroit.

The show itself was spent in a fug of cold medicines, as I battled a sore throat that suddenly appeared during the dress rehearsal, and developed into a cold. But all seemed to go well, though by the last night I was exhausted.

This week's strip was drawn backstage inbetween scenes. Luckily, the scanning has tidied up the art on the last panel a lot, but on the original you can see the smudges where my sweaty hands picked up the ink and spread it all over the page.

Swingball

Originally published 25 June 2010

But it always happens when I play swingball. Real tennis (that's real lawn tennis, as opposed to Real Tennis) is beyond me - I've never played a rally that has lasted for longer than a serve and a return.

Widescreen

Originally published 23 June 2010

If only the BBC broadcast it side on, now TVs are the right shape for it. Alas it still insists in giving us at the same old overhead from one end vista it has since the dawn of TV.