Quimby

My tribute to the Tom and Jerry cartoons I used to watch when I was a kid. It's a pity the BBC no longer has holes in its schedule that it has to plug with repeats of theatrical shorts. This is based on the train set in "The Night before Christmas"

Christmas wrapping

Originally published 27 December 2010

It’s Chrrrriiiiiisssstttmmaaaaaaassssss! A very Merry Christmas / Holidays / Kwanzaa / Festivus / Winterval / Yule / Convenient excuse to get drunk (delete all which do not apply) to you all. And don’t forget to leave the discarded wrapping laying around for your cats to play with.

The Christmas No 1

Originally published 22 December 2010

Don’t worry, Jones won’t be the Christmas Number One. For a start, she’s never appeared on the X Factor, so she’s disqualified already.

I have felt your presents

Originally published 20 December 2010

It’s pointless wrapping presents for cats. Though it can be fun watching them rip into a loosely wrapped catnip mouse.

Going all Philip K Dick on your ass

One for all you comics philosophers out there: if only half a tree appears in a cartoon strip, does the rest of the tree actually exist? Is Smith’s home real or is it just set dressing that is assembled as required for each frame? By extension, how do we actually know the rest of the world beyond our vision is actually there, or is it a simulation assembled as required to give us the illusion of freedom? Happy Christmas.

I’d have some photos for you of Billy and Bella going bonkers in and around our Christmas Tree, but my camera’s run out of battery and I’ve left the charger in the States. (Assuming the States are really there, of course…) Bella’s favourite trick is to remove the tinsel while leaving all the ornaments undisturbed. That and playing with a particularly springy lower branch for hours on end.

Queen Smudge

Dedicated to the real Smudge, who died on Sunday.

Smudge was the kitten who chose me when I came round to visit her litter. There were two female blue and white cats and one hen pecked all-blue male. Smudge saw me and climbed up my trouser legs and up my jumper to say hello. I knew I was going to be hers from that point onwards. And that's how it remained. Linda says I had a special smile I only reserved for Smudge, and I guess that's true, she was always a daddy's girl, and she had me wrapped around her little paw.

She'll be greatly missed, but she'll live on to boss her brother around in this strip. May she bring laughter to other people's lives in the same way she brought joy to mine. And whenever you see a wall, think of her.

My original notes for today: There's very little surplus Jubilee tat in the shops but Sainsbury's and John Lewis are awash in unsold Olympics stuff, which only now has started to reach the sort of price where you would ever consider buying it. But only if you're a fan of Olympic fuschia.

Twas the night before Christmas

Merry Xmas Everybody, as St Noddy of Holder would say. Have a great time, eat loads, and fall asleep in front of the telly. It's the one time of the year when we're all allowed to act like cats.

Postponed

I tell you, those shops are going to be so busy on the 22nd!

I'm drawing the view from my bedroom window here. I can wake up in the morning and if the curtains are open I can check the time from the clock on the church over the road. Better still, at Christmas they put an animated Santa illumination up on the steeple so it looks like he's ringing the bells.

Millie Week 67: Mon 16th - Sat 21st Dec 1991

Yes, you have seen strip number four before. Smith reused it a couple of Christmases ago. Here's that version... Interesting to see that when I'm drawing it myself I reverse the dark panels and the light panels so I have less to do.

There's a strip missing from my scrapbook again, though in this case I think it's a pasting-in error. It's Tuesday's strip, and the script goes thusly...

1. The sitting room - Millie's house. Millie watches as Richard manhandles a trussed up Christmas tree into the room.
MILLIE: YOU'VE GOT A REAL TREE, RICHARD!
RICHARD: YES - I'M FED UP WITH THE ARTIFICIAL ONES.

2. Millie holds the earth filled pot that the tree stands up in, and ensures that the tree stays uproght while Richard puts a pair of scissors to the bit of string that is holding the branches to the trunk.
RICHARD: MIND YOU, THERE IS ONE PROBLEM WITH THEM.

3. He suts the string. The branches spring up violently and needles go flying. Richard is caught full-on by the fallout. Millie, by the base, misses the worst of it.
SFX: SPROING!

4. Millie stands up to observe a now naked Christmas tree, and a Richard who looks like the victim of a natural materials only acupuncturist.
RICHARD: THEY DO TEND TO SHED THEIR NEEDLES A BIT.

Glitter rock

Here's the song Jones is playing on the Piano: Roy Wood and Wizzard's incomparable 'I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day'. Fantastic music, terrifying Glam Rock costumes, appalling miming, some bored children and a video that has 'contractural obligation' written all over it.

Glitterbomb

To get the full animated effect click on today's post and then click on the strip.

The economics of enlightenment

Written at the height of the Barclays Bank LIBOR exchange rate scandal this Autumn. I have some sympathy with Smith's analysis of human economics affairs - how can something so abstract bring so much real hardship to so many?

And say hello to our next door neighbour on Comics Sherpa, Snow of T. Shepherd's excellent 'Snow Sez...' I've always been struck by Snow's acumen when it comes to the economics of enlightenment. It's always seemed to me that every guru's advice has boiled down to these two sentences:

1: To achieve contentment let go of all material things.
2: £1,000 quid, please.

Nigh, I tell you! It's nigh!

No it isn't. Just because the Mayans need to buy a new calendar, it doesn't mean the world is coming to an end. It's a moot point anyway, the Mayans came to an end in the 8th and 9th centuries, so they overestimated the end of their civilization by about 1,200 year.

Scrumpy doesn't believe in the apocalypse either. He just recognises it as an easy way to make everyone else as miserable as him.

Pester power

I don't have any kids, but if I did I imagine this is how I would spend most of my time at the moment, when I wasn't hiding the Argos catalogue or disabling access to commercial kid's TV.

Note to Hastings Borough Council: this is a recycling bin. It's big, strong and re-useable, and can hold a week's worth of discarded newspapers and magazines ready for collection each week. It is not a flimsy pink polythene bag which will break as soon as you lift it up and which will end up as landfill anyway. Hint. Hint.

Boxing Day

Today is the Feast of Stephen so 'Good King Wenceslas' is actually a Boxing Day carol.

It always annoys me that the USA starts to dismantle Christmas and goes back to work as soon as the day itself is over. You've got it all wrong. There are twelve days to Christmas and this is just day two. Christmas isn't over till the twelfth drummer drums. Britain won't go back to work until Wednesday - as Christmas fell over the weekend we reckon it doesn't really count as a holidays and tack another day onto the end.

Why is it called Boxing Day? Allow me to go all Wikipedia on you:

"In the UK, it was a custom for tradesmen to collect "Christmas boxes" of money or presents on the first weekday after Christmas as thanks for good service throughout the year. This is mentioned in Samuel Pepys' diary entry for 19 December 1663; This custom is linked to an older English tradition: in exchange for ensuring that wealthy landowners' Christmases ran smoothly, their servants were allowed to take the 26th off to visit their families. The employers gave each servant a box containing gifts and bonuses (and sometimes leftover food)."

All perfectly true. It still goes on today. Though the killjoys at the Post Office today (I wrote this on December 4th) instructed their postmen not to accept Christmas Boxes of over £30 as 'they could be construed as bribes'. First they take away their pensions, then they take away their bonuses, and now this.

I'm not expecting any post this Christmas.

Millie Week 17; Thu 27 - Sat 29 Dec 1990

Click to enlarge

Happy Christmas!!! Oooo. New tablet? Schmancy!

My wife has been knitting the same sweater for me for the last four years! It'll never be finished because it'll never reach the high standards she sets herself, so she keeps on pulling it apart and starting it again.

How on earth did I get the word 'frottage' past the Mirror? They would always call me up on imagined problems - I once referenced the famous dance DJ Joey Negro in a strip and got called up on it until I explained that it was a real name. But somehow, frottage never got spotted.

Millie Week 17; Mon 24 & Wed 26 Dec 1990

Click to enlarge

British papers don't publish on Christmas Day, so there are only two cartoons here today.

Ah, dear old Cheesy Wotsit. Whatever happened to her? Well, it turns out she's been doing a lot of British TV in soaps I never watch, like Emmerdale and Holby City. And then she's been a contestant in Strictly Come Dancing. I never watch that either. Sorry, Patsy, you've been very busy but you've disappeared completely below my radar.

Note the Christmas sweater Millie is wearing in the Boxing Day strip.

A Merry Christmas to you all. May you all have a truly magical day...

Christmas viewing

Forget the turkey, if BBC America isn't showing the Doctor Who Christmas special on Christmas night there's going to be an international incident...

•They are, at 9/8c, whatever that means. What is that in mountain time?

Merry Xmas Everybody

The perennial stompalong party hit by Slade, as much a part of a British Christmas as plum duff and Charles Dickens. If you don't know the song, and Noddy Holder's famous holler over the fade out, here it is, from and old Top of the Pops. Jones is doing the bit at 3.30. And, yes, they are miming to the record.

In the clip the odd looking man in the Santa suit is Jimmy Saville, DJ and national treasure, who died a month ago.

Millie Week 15; Thu 20 - Sat 22 Dec 1990

Click to enlarge

I never got that scalextric set.

If you don't know the carol, here it is...