I'd like to thank the academy...

Shucks, guys. This is the humblest day in my life etc.

The winning cartoon is here.

No, seriously, this is a great honour, not least because it was voted for my my peers and the public. And to be fair, I didn't win the award outright, I'm sharing it with Loren Fishman's Humoresque for this cartoon, which gets even cleverer the closer you look at it.

Ting!

Today's subject is music. It's good to see Jones at the piano again. Jones's main love is boogie-woogie and ragtime, but this time around, she's playing the overture to 'The Phantom of the Opera', chosen because the heavy chords in the score looks like she's building up to a huge crescendo.

Smith isn't a musician. Hence: percussion, and a tendency to drift off in the middle of a concerto.

Millie will appear tomorrow.

Dangdangdang

Today's subject is New Inventions - and this was the one that caused me the most problems. The ideas for the other strips this week came into my head quite readily, but this one was a slog. I'm still not sure it works.

Chinese Handcuffs

Today's subject was Chinese Handcuffs. Hmm, tough one. This presumes that my characters have fingers. Strictly speaking, they don't.

Despite the stubby digits on their paws they are somehow able to operate computers and play the piano. Don't ask me how - that's just the magic of cartoons. However, having cats be able to manipulate a Chinese finger trap is just beyond credulity. So I used their tails instead, and today's strip was born.

Copernipuss

Today's subject is Science, Physics, Astronomy and this seemed to be the perfect excuse to explain the way a cat views the universe. But then you suspected this already, didn't you?

999

Todays subject is Law Enforcement and Cops.

Dialing 999 is the UK equivalent of dialing 911. The theory was that, in the days of phones with rotary dials, it would be easy to select the right numbers to dial in darkness or a smoke filled room. The theory was quite good, but surelly dialing 000 would have been easier, and dialling 111 nine times faster?

This is my first experiment with animated gifs. I won't be using them often, but they'll crop up now and again when I think they are appropriate and add to the strip.

Crisis on Infinite Sherpas!

Yes, there' s a big event happening this week that will change the Sherpaverse forever. In an attempt to unite the continuities of strips as diverse as Jack Radio, Navy Bean, Cubie 'n' Bouncy and Mr Todd there's going to be some white-hot crossover action this week which will leave the Sherpaverse shattered...

No not really.

Actually, this week's event is much more benign. 30 Sherpa strips (list to be added here as soon as I get it) have been given a set of topics to play with; a new one for each day this week. I'm participating from Monday through Saturday - I thought it would be cheating to have a strip on Sunday's topic: 'Animals'.

Check through the comics on Sherpa this week and see what you discover. There's a lot of wonderful stuff on there. (There's also a fair amount of rubbish, but there's a lot of really wonderful material out there.)

This weeks festivities have been arranged by Bill Wandel of Mixed Medications, Derrick Wood of Rogue Symmetry, Jon Carter of Cartertoons (who also supplied the logo) and 'tame' of Nano-World. Thanks to all of them. Read their strips.

Today's topic is Art and Painting. This dovetails nicely with a series I'm currently writing which is due to coincide with my hometown of Hastings' annual festival of chinstroking modern art, and the opening of the controversial Jerwood Gallery on the seafront. I had a few ideas that I couldn't fit into the main storyline, so I used one of them for today's subject.

Jones is trying to carve a lump of Hastings sandstone - outcrops of this rock appear all over Hastings and the Kent and Sussex Weald, and it's the stuff Hastings Castle is built of. It is not, repeat NOT a potato.