Crossed eyes

I have no pictures of the real Smith and Jones, who used to live in the house next door to me when I was a kid, but they were both cross eyed pedigree Siamese cats.

This is very much what the real Smith looked like - he had that oriental look and a pair of bright blue, subtly off-beam eyes...

...While this is how I remember Jones. Rather than the pale chocolate point I depict her as in the cartoon, she was actually a seal tabby point. Having to draw in those complicated tabby markings would have meant she would have lost clarity around the face once the cartoons were reduced to 600 dpi wide as GoGomics require.

Fierce

Originally published 11 January 2010

Ooooo! Doesn't Jones look fierce in this strip? This is another hangover from the way I used to draw the cats in the 80s - nowadays I don't bother to draw the entire eye and then add lids. Instead I use a technique I've borrowed from Dexter's Laboratory - when Jones gets annoyed her eyes go all horn-rimmed.

Nowadays in this situation I'd draw her with her eyes wide open, anyway. She'd just be playing. Here she seems to have too much intent…

Flash! AaaaaaAaaaaah!

Wednesday's cartoon led in a natural progression to this one. I was considering the properties of cats eyes - and the other remarkable thing about them is the amount of light they are able to reflect. This, coupled with seeing Smudge sitting on my USB turntable (for converting my old vinyl to MP3s) as I coloured in the strip one day, led me to this.

The turntable Jones is sitting on is an old fashioned Dansette, a portable record player much loved by teenagers in the 60s. In fact, it's my sister's. It comes from an age when continuous play meant stacking ten singles onto the spindle and then letting them drop one at a time on the turntable, like a juke box.

Eye calisthenics

Ever played with a cat and watched its pupils dilate and contract? To quote an old Ukranian proverb I've just made up: "The pupils are largest before the pounce."