Hitch-hiking

Time can go a bit wibbly in cartoon strips. By one measure, just 24 hours have passed since Smith and Jones escaped from the cattery. By another measure, six weeks have gone by. Which is why the fields in the background are now newly harvested expanses of stubble.

Signs

This is possibly the first time I've ever used a font in Smith apart from the urls below the strip. As I've mentioned before, I tend not to like the use of fonts in cartoon strips as they look too mechanical and never match with the artwork. You can tell when the writing and the artwork on a page don't match.

On the other hand I'm a real font nerd, and a road sign which didn't have the right typeface on it (MoT Transport Medium in this case) would drive me mad. So I've taken care to use the correct font, but then skew and distort it just enough to match the shaky line of my own artwork.

(PS: smith.ink )

Mnk.

Don't worry, this story arc is not going to end with that cop-out to end all cop-outs: "..and then Jones woke up in the shower and found the last two months had all been a dream". I have a real ending for this all worked out.

The animals staring at Jones are a fox, a badger (hello, Scott) a stoat, a rabbit and a goat.

Gimme Shelter

Jones' arachnophobia reappears. One of those strips where all the action takes place between the panels. The explosion isn't really needed, the humour is in the aftermath.

Don't have a cow

Note how the colouring is getting darker as the day progresses. Just for this essipode I've introduced some shadowing as well.

I'm quite proud of the last panel. I've managed to give the impression of a charging cow without having to draw all those difficult legs.

"CATS!"

You wouldn't believe the number of times I've seen this. I'm convinced there is no such thing as a bad dog - just bad owners.

What?

This is how I feel sometimes when I'm explaining 'The Internet' to clients.

A new game

My original idea for the final frame was just to have the cats rushing off panel shouting 'NOOOOOO!', but I decided against that, as sometimes people ascribe a darker interpretation to things that happen offstage that that which I intended. Let me assure you, Sandy has not been run over and will return on Friday...

Tag!

What did you call this game? You know the one, it's the chase game where one person is designated 'it' and has to chase after everyone else in the playground. The first person they manage to touch then becomes 'it', and the chase continues until someone gets injured or you get stopped by a dinner lady. I've seen it called, 'Tag', 'Tip' or ' Tig' but when I was a kid in 1970s Kent, we called it 'He'.

Those nice people at the Daily Mirror's usvsthem have provided this map of the regional differences, which insists that I lived about thirty miles away from the 'He' zone. Maybe London's influence was stronger than I realised at the time.

Sneak sneak

This reminds me of that old West Texan joke: "My dog ran away from me last week. I watched him run for three days..."

As good as balls, only more sticky

I looked at this strip and that was the phrase that stuck out. Oo-er Missus!

Sandy

We resume our normal programming with the strip that would have been playing yesterday if only WW1 hadn't happened. See? We're still feeling the unintended consequences of that senseless conflict!

Today we learn the name of the dog. Sandy was Linda's dog - when she moved over here to join me she sadly had to leave Sandy behind with her parents. She couldn't have come over here - Britain has some really strict quarantine laws, the kind that only come with an island mentality. It wouldn't have been fair for her to spend three months in a kennels and then move into a top floor apartment in Tunbridge Wells. She was dearly missed, but we got to see her every twelve months or so whenever we came to visit Linda's folks.

Sandy was a very happy and enthusiastic dog with an uncontrollably joyous tail - so joyous that she once demolished an entire Christmas village of miniature ceramic houses with a single wag.

The lamps are going out...

“The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime” Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, August 1914

It was one hundred years ago today that Sergeant Pepper led the boys to unimaginable slaughter on an industrial scale. We interrupt our story to commemorate the event that to a large extent created the mess we're all in now.

World War 1 was very much a steampunk war - all goggles, leather jerkins, airships and cogs - inventions such as tanks, aircraft and machine guns mechanised the killing in a way that had been impossible up to this point.

I'm no historian. I'm just some wooly liberal guy that thinks that any war anywhere means we've failed as a species to justify our position at the top of the evolutionary tree. So to explain what this refers to I'll pass you over to the website at http://www.1418now.org.uk/lights-out/

The outbreak of the First World War was a cataclysmic event in world history. We know now that the enormous losses, huge economic cost and unprecedented political upheavals incurred by the conflict would change the world forever. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems extraordinary to us that no one was able to intervene to halt the slow descent into war triggered by the unexpected assassination, in distant Sarajevo, of a foreign royal by a 19-year-old terrorist. Were Europe’s statesmen blind to the catastrophe that they were bringing down upon the world?

The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, was among those to glimpse the enormity of the imminent war. For almost ten years he had aligned Britain into a deepening friendship with the great European powers of France and Russia. Although this new relationship had alienated Germany, Grey had tried to keep Britain free from any firm commitment to intervene should a wider European war break out. Yet in July 1914 he stood at the heart of the crisis as ultimatums came and went, and the political and military decisions were taken that made it increasingly likely that Britain would stand beside France and Russia if either was attacked by Germany or Austria-Hungary. The German invasion of Belgium en route to France finally tipped the balance, making Britain’s entry into war inevitable.

Late in the afternoon of 3 August, on the last day of peace, Grey stood at the window of his office in Whitehall and was overwhelmed by a sense of foreboding tragedy. As he looked out he saw that the streets lights were being lit down below. He turned to a visiting friend and observed, ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’

Tonight we're invited to switch off all our lights but one between the hours of 10pm and 11pm, as we approach the 100th anniversary of the moment Britain entered what was to become known (quite wrongly) as 'The Great War'.

Shlock!

This dog's going to be a keeper. She only appears in a few strips this year, but she'll be back...