The first strip

Originally published 1 January 2010

The story so far…

Smith was my second strip on Comics Sherpa. The first, Riverfields, was about a shopping mall, and it sort of fizzled out as the Credit Crunch hit, and I started to get annoyed with the human characters. After a break of about a year or so, I returned to my drawing board and resurrected some characters I'd drawn when I was at school, Smith and Jones.

It looks bit different doesn't it? As an experiment I drew this strip with an Italic Berol marker. I never used that pen again - the lines were too thick. You'll also notice that Jones has had the pints on her face shaded with black pen - a hangover from the strips I did when I was a kid, when everything had to be black and white. I immediately realised this wasn't necessary - and I could colour in Jones's points afterwards.

To start off with the strip was just Smith and Jones. I know I had other characters to introduce, but I was going to wait till Easter before I started introducing them. First of all Smith and Jones had to be established, with Smith as the dignified one and Jones as the clown forever puncturing his pomposity - a classic double act in other words.

When this site gets redesigned at the end of the year I'll repost all the Riverfields strips in their own section.

Technical note: These early strips are all at 600 pixels across - these date from before the blog so I had no reason to save them at the higher resolution.

First post

My comic, 'Smith', started appearing on GoComics one year ago with the strip you see above. In that time two things have surprised me:

1) I'm still doing it.
2) It's getting a following.

Thanks to everyone responsible for item number two - you are the ones that ensure item number one keeps happening.

For those that don't know the strip, it's a thrice weekly strip about a couple of domestic cats, Smith, the Seal Point Siamese, and his sister, Jones, who is more of a fudge-point than a chocolate point. You can find it at www.gocomics.com/Smith

It's based on a couple of cats that used to live next door to me when I was growing up in Tunbridge Wells in the late 70s. I didn't have a cat of my own at the time, so I effectively adopted these two. When their owner moved out of town and took the cats with them I started drawing cartoons of them, and this developed into a series of unpublished daily strips that I drew religiously until a year after I left school and had to join the real world.

Fast forward 28 years, and they're back. In the intervening time I'd gone through a series of dead end jobs, finally found a niche as a graphic artist and production manager at a magazine publishing company, concurrently scripted a daily comic strip, 'Millie' for the Daily Mirror in London, discovered the theatre, and moved to Hastings. Millie had finished in the Mirror 15 years ago (curse you Piers Morgan!) It was time to get back to the pens and see if I still had it.

It appears I did. You are here.

I'll be doing several things in this blog:

a) I'll be providing commentary on new strips as they appear, explaining some of the more Brit-centric references to my largely US-based audience, and telling the story of how they came to be.
b) I'll be posting some of the original Smith cartoons from the 80s.
c) I'll occasionally post some of my previous strips, Millie, Mike Pike and Riverfields, and anything else from my filing cabinet that looks interesting.
d) Anything else that takes my fancy. It's my blog - so I can be as self indulgent as I like. So, ner!

To be continued...