Millie No. 1

Daily Mirror, Saturday 31 March 1990

This was the first ever Millie strip. Millie was a strip that ran for five years in the Daily Mirror, written my myself and drawn by the incredibly talented Roger Mahoney (now currently sublimating his easy and fluent art style by drawing Andy Capp meticulously in the style of the late Reg Smythe).

It was originally written as a daily strip, but the Mirror gave us a trial run for the first five months or so as a weekly, appearing as a two deck strip on Saturdays. I wasn't complaining, I was a raw and untried writer and this was my big break. I duly ripped up everything I had written up to that point and remixed it into the new format. This is why a lot of these early strips could also work as two separate strips - it wasn't until a few months later that I got used to the new length, and then we were granted a daily spot on the comics page.

I'll have to explain some of the early 90s references. The Hippodrome was at the time owned by Peter Stringfellow, and the sort of place you would find Page 3 models, soap stars and tabloid gossip column hacks, along with a  lot of young women in white stilettos. As far as I was concerned it has 'avoid' written all over it, but to a 14 year old teenager like Millie it would be the epitome of glamour.

'...the streets being paved with gold' - the legend of Dick Whittington is the story of a poor boy who travelled to London (with his cat) to find his fortune because he'd heard of the aforementioned metaphorical paving and became Lord Mayor of London three times over. Based on a true story, Richard Whittington did exist and he actually became Mayor four times, a case of the truth actually being better than the legend.

If there is an opposite to the epitome of glamour, Catford is it. A dreary south London suburb, not quite Lewisham, not quite Bromley, one of those places you pass through on the way to somewhere else, I picked it as the epitome of nowhere - and because it had the word 'cat' in it.

I'll be posting Millie strips on Saturdays from now on.

Q. What's brown and sticky? A. A stick

Show your cat a stick, a biro, anything pointy... see what happens.

Note: I usually put these strips up on the blog just before I go to bed, and about five hours before they go live on GoComics, because I'm working to GMT and I think GoComics works to Central Time.

Two of the cats behind 'Smith'

Meet Smudge and Gizmo, the two cats who allow me to cadge ideas off of them.

Smudge is the grand old lady sitting in the bean bag. Yes, she is the cat with a wall obsession in the cartoon strip. She's a delightful and loving cat but with soft fur and a purr that can cause interference to FM radio, but she definitely has to be the one in charge.

She's 14 years old now. She lost her brother Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley, and also appearing in the strip) a couple of years ago, and needed someone new to boss about, so Gizmo arrived to fill the vacancy.

Gizmo's about five and spends most of his time ridding the world of the menace of feathers and newspapers. When not chasing inanimate objects he becomes The Most Pathetic Cat In The World.

More photos later.

Always pause at the threshold *

* I think this poem title by Paul Gallico (yes, the Poseidon Adventure guy) inspired today's strip. I don't remember the rest of the poem, I just remember the title. I found a copy of the book, 'Honorable Cat', that this came from in one of Tunbridge Wells' many second hand book shops, popped out again to find an ATM and by the time I returned it was gone. Pah! But it inspired this strip so it wasn't a totally wasted lunch break.

Smith's first appearance in print

Here, taken from the Autumn 1980 issue of The Leopard, the magazine of the Skinners' School, Tunbridge Wells, is the first ever published Smith cartoon. It appeared when I was 16, and was credited to A. J. Pilcher of Form 61BL.

Let's put that in perspective. When this was published, The Empire Strikes Back had just been released, the Moscow Olympics had just taken place, there were still hostages in the US embassy in Iran and everyone was convinced that we'd die in a nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR at some point in the not too distant future. Ah, happy carefree days!

It's remarkable how little Smith has changed since then (apart from the loss of the pretentious teenage handwriting).

This is as angry as I get, folks.

I don’t do politics very often in ‘Smith’ - its a subtle art full of pitfalls and I don’t think it has a place in a simple cartoon strip about cats. However, that doesn’t stop me from occasionally reflecting the absurdity of the results of our leaders' political machinations with some absurdity of my own.

This strip was written last summer (I like to keep a good six month buffer of scripts ready just in case I ever have a fallow patch with no ideas), expecting the austerity measures brought in by the coalition to start biting about now. As they have, with thousands of public servants losing funding and jobs left right and centre, and VAT going up to 20%, but strangely no bankers feeling the pinch.

But that’s enough of that. That’s just whining. If you want a comic strip that’s just a whine read Mallard Filmore instead. I’ll just stick to being daft.

Incidentally - to make the last panel look sufficiently childlike I drew it with my left hand. Smith returns to right-handed full colour normality on Wednesday.

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...