Ptui

Don't argue with Gnuckles

As Morrissey once said, some Gnomes are bigger than others.

Gnome Tipping

I'm not a garden gnome fan. If you're going to go to the bother of making your garden beautiful why ruin it with a cheap imported plastic gnome from Poundland?

Gnome tipping is like cow tipping, only much easier to do.

P. U.

I assure you, it's not just dogs that do this.

I say wysteria, you say wisteria

The Chelsea Flower Show is happening this week, so I thought I'd use it as the peg to hang the next batch of cartoons from.

I like a nice garden but I wouldn't know a hollyhock from a sweet pea - whenever we're in the park and Linda asks me what a particular flower is, I can only answer 'That's a plant'. If pressed I can narrow it down to 'a blue one' or 'a red one'.

Wysteria can be spelled 'Wysteria', 'Wisteria' or even 'wistaria', but I'm sticking with the first one, because I'm the kind of guy who spells 'Colour' with a U.

The power of carrots

Sometimes that happiness just comes bursting through, like an unwelcome ray of sunshine on an otherwise perfect rainy day.

Crossed eyes

I have no pictures of the real Smith and Jones, who used to live in the house next door to me when I was a kid, but they were both cross eyed pedigree Siamese cats.

This is very much what the real Smith looked like - he had that oriental look and a pair of bright blue, subtly off-beam eyes...

...While this is how I remember Jones. Rather than the pale chocolate point I depict her as in the cartoon, she was actually a seal tabby point. Having to draw in those complicated tabby markings would have meant she would have lost clarity around the face once the cartoons were reduced to 600 dpi wide as GoGomics require.

Butterfly or moth?

A passing Badger has informed me that as the butterfly has a furry thorax it's actually a moth. Which is a pity, as I consider the moth to be the evil twin of the butterfly, though I have no idea why that should be. Maybe it's because moths are nocturnal and are always frying themselves on my halogen lamps.

Billy and Bella in new photos shock

Wasp on a wall

I love Chumley. He's such a gentle soul, and his laid back live-and-let-live approach to life is one I try my best to emulate. Sadly, his lack of internal or external conflict makes him very hard to write for, which is why he doesn't appear as much as I'd like.

Chumley is Smudge's brother - which is why he's the only other creature alive that is allowed to sit on Smudge's sacred wall. Not that he sees why a wall has to be sacred anyway.

Big hand

Panel two is an attempt to draw sarcasm. I'm not sure the heavily lidded eyes work with Smith's markings, but it was worth a try.

The paw of doom

One of the odd things about 'Smith' is that it makes no sense to anyone reading it in black and white. Jones and Smudge look exactly the same as one another before the colouring is added, and there are a few strips that rely on the colour renderingbefore the joke appears. In this case the shadow of Smudge's paw doesn't appear in the original artwork.

I saw Bella playing with a wasp today, and she got stung on her paw before I could stop her. She licked her paw a couple of times and then went back to her game of bashing the wasp, letting it go and bashing it again. She's hardcore.

Jasper

Time for some Smudge and Chumley strips I think - we haven't seen them for a while.

Billie and Bella are turning into an efficient bug killing team. No moth, fly or wasp that dares to enter our house gets out again alive. Especially the wasps, which somehow they are able to pluck out of the air without getting stung. A trick which Smudge hasn't learned yet, alas.

Mouthwash

Adapted from an old Millie strip.