Home again

Home at last - and it's like they've never been away.

Halfway through colouring this strip in I realised I'd forgotten to draw any street lamps. So I lit the strip with windows instead.

The neighbourhood I've drawn could be anywhere on either side of the Atlantic - there's a bungaloid strain to Sussex that could just as well be Levittown. I've modelled this neighbourhood on the 60's ranch houses and bungalows around Ashford Way, about five minutes away from my house.

School's in...

Awwwww!

Float

OK, I'll stop slaughtering pheasants now - Smith and Jones have finally found their way back home. They're very lucky as these milk floats are rapidly vanishing from our streets. When I lived in Tunbridge Wells I'd always be able to tell when it was 4am in the morning, as I could always hear the whine of the float's electric motor and the merry jangling of the milk bottles as I lay awake in bed. Alas, the rise of plastic bottles from supermarkets has meant hardly anyone gets their milk delivered anymore.

Pheasantgeddon!

Is this a comment on the slaughter of the First World War and the cheerfulness with which the Tommies went to their deaths? Or am I just fed up with the number of dead pheasants i see at the side of the road on my daily commute? You decide.

Pheasant

Pheasants are possibly the most stupid creatures on Earth, and they definitely have no idea what road safety is. I've never hit a pheasant on the road, but it's been a close run thing sometimes. I drive to work every day down rural B-roads in Kent and Sussex, and you quite often find yourself rounding a corner to find a dumb bird in the middle of the road, and when you swerve to avoid him he will walk deliberately into the path of your car.

How stupid are pheasants? I was cycling down a country lane once when I came across one next to a wooden fence. The pheasant ducked behind one end of the fence, walked behind it and then appeared at the other end. I got off my bike to say hello to it and it hid behind the fence again. When it reappeared at the other end, I was there waiting for it. Eeeek! It went behind the fence again, I walked back to the other end and the pheasant popped its head out once more. Repeat this sequence for half an hour. (To be honest, the pheasant is probably telling the same story to his friends, only he starts it with 'How stupid are cyclists?')

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.

Shlock!

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

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.