Little Cheyne Court

If there's one thing Romney Marsh has a lot of, it's wind, so it was the perfect place to build a wind farm. There are 26 turbines at Little Cheyne Court, each one 377 feet high. Some people think they're eyesores, but I think they're wonderful, and definitely preferable to the nuclear power station a few miles down the road. They can be seen gently churning out the megawatts from miles around - you can even see them from the top of The Ridge in Hastings, twenty miles away.

This is also a bit of a preview of a big change that is going to happen to the strip in the Autumn. Remember when I did a month of Sundays last year? I enjoyed doing that so much that I'm planning to move to that more upright Sunday format for keeps in the near future.

I'll still be keeping to the Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule - I'll just be changing to the new format.

Three things have led to me deciding to go for a more upright format.

1) Let's face it, newspapers are dying. There's no need to keep to the traditional long strip cartoon format any more. The web is now the default distribution method for comics, and drawing them to specifications created for the print media and then delivering them on computers, phone and tablets that require something completely different no longer makes any sense.

2) Sherpa has a width limit of 600 pixels, but allows an infinite amount of depth. Let's use that space! I get to draw bigger, you get to see more art, and the strip can change shape depending on the requirements of that particular day's gag.

3) I have an Android tablet now - traditionally shaped strips just look lost on that thing.

The new format strips begin at the end of September.

And now - a picture of the wind farm, some sheep, some flatness and a power line from the nuclear power station.

Nominative Determinism

Nominative determinsm is the theory that your name has a direct influence over your future life. For example, someone called Dirk Thrust would be an international playboy and man of mystery, while Colin Prenderghast would work in accounts for a small company that makes the clips for ballpoint pens. It works for dogs as well- Pointers point, Springer Spaniels are boisterous, Greyhounds drive buses and Terriers, er… terry.

Sheep

If you're a conservative, this is probably how you think liberals think. If you're a liberal, this is probably how you think conservatives think. If you use the word 'sheeple' in the comments on web forums, (usually after the statement WAKE UP AMERICA!!!) then you probably aren't capable of rational thought at all.

Follow the leader

Romney Marsh is famed for its sheep. In fact, if you eat New Zealand lamb, there's a good chance that that cutlet was descended from a Romney sheep - the local breed proved to be so hardy and so good at wool bearing that it got exported all over the world.

Mitt Romney's family was a less successful export.

The Royal Military Canal

Romney Marsh is mostly below sea level, so drainage has to be carefully managed. The marsh is criss-crossed by artificial ditches, dykes and channels, and it's one of these that Smith has fallen into.

The marsh is girded by one great big almighty ditch, The Royal Military Canal, built in the early 1800s as part of England's defences against a Napoleonic invasion that never happened.

The theory was that Romney Marsh was likely to be the beachhead of any invasion, as it's low lying, sparsely populated, and about 30 miles off the coast of France. Originally, England planned to defend itself by flooding the marsh. This proved impractical, as by the time the marsh was flooded any troops that had landed there would have been long gone. So instead, it was proposed that a big canal would be cut around the marsh. The excavated earth would be used to make an earthwork on the north side, behind which British troops would be stationed - two defensive barrier for the price of one. The canal was also given a strangely kinked route, to allow the British troops a clear shot at any enemy troops that tried to cross it.

It was very much a British Maginot line. If the French had decided to invade, all they had to do was follow the route that worked so well for them in 1066 - land at Pevensey and go around the canal.

The Fifth Continent

Welcome to Romney Marsh, a landscape like no other.

It's flat. Very flat. And almost featureless. Take the landscape of the Llano Estacado in West Texas and Eastern New Mexico, flatten it out a bit more, criss cross it with dykes, fill it with sheep and paint it a fresh shade of green. Now maybe flatten it out one more time. Then you should end up with a view that looks something like this.

Like Texas, the landscape is 80% sky.

Why does it look like this? Well, 750 years ago this was all sea, until the Great Storm of 1287. This altered the coastline of Kent and Sussex in many ways - the ports of Winchelsea and Rye found themselves stranded two miles inland, Hastings lost its harbour, the Isle of Thanet stopped being an island and the seabed started silting up, creating 100 square miles of new land - Romney Marsh. Even now, most of it is still below sea level, and the only things standing higher than hedge height are the few farm buildings, trees and churches.

Driving on the Marsh is great fun - the roads zig and zag unpredictably, crossing ditches at right angles and following the patterns of old field boundaries that have long since vanished. Mists blow in from the sea, atmospherically.

 The great thing about Romney Marsh for a cartoonist is that it's very easy to draw - it's essentially a horizontal line with a few trees added to it.

Find out more about Romney Marsh here… (Warning - site contains Comic Sans)

Oh, the irony

They've missed their lift so it looks like Smith and Jones are going to be finding their own way home. Stay tuned for Smith and Jones, the Incredible Journey…

Peng

'Peng!' just seemed to be the right sound for a wire mesh fence gradually coming apart, wires snapping one by one, but I was sure I'd seen it somewhere before. It turns out it was from a Swiss revolutionary comic from the 1968 student protests, 'The Deadly Finger'. It's the sound of the reader being shot by a revolutionary for being too bourgeois. And the last frame of the comic was also used by Stereolab as the logo for Peng Records, the indie label they released their first few albums on...

Run

Shelf

Dig

Have you noticed that every Prisoner of War movie ever made contains a character called Ginger? Were they actually based on catteries?

The Bide-a-Wee Cattery

I always feel guilty about us leaving the cats at the cattery whenever we go off on holiday. This series is me addressing the sense of guilt.

To be fair, the cattery I always send my cats to is nothing like as basic as the bide-a-wee cattery Smith goes to. It has central heating and perching shelves on several levels and a window to look out of and an external run to play in. However, it still has that florescent-lit central corridor which gives it that forbidding jailhouse atmosphere. And sometimes there's that one cat at the end of the corridor in the Hannibal Lecter mask...

Tools of the trade

Originally posted on the forum at the Snow Sez blog (currently down for maintenance) last autumn.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that whenever two or three cartoonists are gathered together, they will eventually compare pens (but only after complaining about their editor/syndicate/scriptwriter/bank balance). I have my pens out - let's go…

Ideas
I don't know where they come from - but I tend to keep a sheet of paper next to me at work which I scribble ideas onto when they come. The problem tends not to be getting the gags so much as alighting upon a subject to work on. Once the subject or situation is there the gags arrive by applying a sort of comic logic to it. I like to write the strips well in advance - a habit I got into when writing a cartoon strip for the Daily Mirror in the 90s. I currently have Smith written up to January 2014. All I have to do now is draw them.

Getting the ideas on paper and scripting.
I don't actually script any more - I used to do that when I was writing 'Millie' for the Daily Mirror but now I'm drawing a strip myself I know what I want to draw. Instead I just rough out the dialogue in a steno book ($2.99 for a pack of three from Walmart + air fare to New Mexico) and show where the panels are going to be. If it's a strip that majors on the visuals rather than the dialogue I'll make a few cryptic notes. Here's a sample of my notes for a couple of strips from last August.

These are strips this turned into. As you can see, the second one evolved into something completely different.

Substrate.*
This keeps on changing. I used to draw in sketch books but Derwent stopped making the ones with the paper that suited me perfectly, so now I'm drawing on loose sheets of cartridge paper or Bristol Board. My current preference is 200gsm acid free cartridge from Rymans, which has just the right combination of smoothness and resistance. The paper size is A4 and I fit two strips onto a sheet - I'd like to draw larger but I only have an A4 scanner.

Panels.
Meet the Pilcher Patent Panel-o-matic®. It's a bit of card with a grid on it, and two big strip-sized holes cut out of it. The grid was produced in Adobe InDesign, and shows where the panel gaps should be for strips with two, three, four, five, six or seven panels. All you have to do is place the Panel-o-matic over a blank sheet of paper, mark where the corners are for each strip and then make small marks where the panel gaps should be. Remove Panel-o-matic and join the dots using a ruler. Your strip is now ready for your pencils. If anyone wants to make their own I can provide a pdf of the template, but note that it's been designed for European A4 paper.

Pencils.
Pencilling is very much the first draft of the strip. At this point I just try to get the art down as quickly as I can; refinements like making the characters the correct size and so on tend to happen at the inking stage as I review the errors in the pencils. I used to use a technical pencil with a non-photo blue lead, but lately I've returned to using good old fashioned 2B pencils from Faber Castell. Erasing happens with a putty rubber. (Yes, we call erasers 'rubbers' over here. Stop sniggering.)

Inking.
I'm a pen nerd. Smith is inked with a vast variety of pens and markers, and I'm a big fan of obscure Japanese pigment markers. My current pen combination is
Frames and balloons: Kuretake Zig .08 micron pigment marker
Main drawing: Pilot 0.5 micron pigment market
Whiskers: Kuretake Zig .01 micron pigment marker
Black infill, and Smith's seal points: Muji brush pen

Lettering.
It takes a lot of work for a comic font not to look mechanical, and nine times out of ten it does't match the artwork its applied to. This is why I applaud Theresa's (T. Shepherd - Snow Sez...) choice to create her own font from her handwriting - it's expertly done and looks perfectly natural. I myself prefer to do the lettering by hand on paper, rather than add it in post production. It's my normal handwriting - I don't bother with rulers, I work out the positioning of the letters at the pencilling stage and then just write over the top. Until recently I used Pentel disposable italic fountain pens for the lettering, but I found the nibs didn't last very long, so I've reverted to using good old fashioned Tempo pens instead.

Scanning.
After a quick once over with a rubber (I said stop sniggering) the art is ready for scanning. I scan in greyscale at 150 lines to the inch, which leads to a scan about 1800 pixels wide. Irritatingly, Canon no longer updates the drivers to my scanner, which means it is no longer works with my current Mac - so when ever I do a scan I have to start up a ten year old iMac with a seven year old system, do the scans, and then transfer them over to my new one.

Photoshopping.
Once the cartoon is on the right Mac, I open it in Photoshop. First of all, I adjust the contrast to make the blacks blacker and the whites whiter, and then clean up any spots that may have appeared on the scan. The GoComics and blog addresses are added to the bottom, the artwork is flattened, and then a macro is applied which converts the strip to RGB and splits it into three layers, one on top with the line art on it, set to multiply, plus two other layers underneath. The bottom layer is used for colouring in backgrounds, and fine detail goes onto the middle layer. Other layers may be created if I want to use a special lighting effect, but this doesn't happen often. My colouring aesthetic comes from Herge's TinTin books, so I prefer flat areas of colour. My preferred palette is the wonderfully named DIC Colour Guide, which comes as standard with Photoshop and provides the fairly muted colours I prefer.

Exporting.
For GoComics I export one version at 600 pixels wide in the GIF format. I use flat areas of colour so using GIF provides me with sharper art with a smaller file size than an JPG would. Another GIF at 1200 pixels wide is exported for uploading to my blog. Then the original Photoshop file is saved as an original for future use.

And that's all there is to it.

*nerdy word for paper

Update
Of course, I can't be expected to stick to the same combination of paper and pens for long - I'm constantly experimenting and working my way through the variety of pens available at M Saltmarsh in Tunbridge Wells. I've reverted to the non-photo blue technical pencil and discovered the Sharpie range of pens which recently arrived in the UK. Lettering is now done with a cartridge pen with a fine italic nib. The paper is 220gsm Heavyweight papier dessin épas from Daler-Rowney which I bought in a job lot when Hobbycraft were having a sale.

Vacation

There was lots of confusion on GoComics this morning, with a few transatlantic readers thinking the holiday Smith refers to in today's cartoon was the 4th of July. Of course, Smith is using the word in its British sense of 'vacation'. I think 'holiday' must still mean vacation in the States, other wise Holiday Inn would be a chain of hotels that only open for business on Mondays every eight weeks or so.