Millie week 20

I used a variation of this joke last year on Smith.

Hey, it's my joke. I can recycle it as many times as I like!

Friction burns

I don't know how some people just stick to the same number of panels in every strip they do - the standard issue of three or four never seems to be enough. I've found myself doing a lot of six and seven panel ones lately - they're more work but I think they're worth it.

Shed!

Our carpet is about 25% cat hair, I reckon, and that's despite owning a Vax super sucky pet hair destroying vacuum cleaner. It's not as bad as it used to be - Cholmondeley was a cat who had more fur than surface area to grow it on, so he used to shed prostigious amounts of blue hair every time he moved.

The vanishing gull

If this was inspired by anything it would be those moments in Tom and Jerry Cartoons where Tom would think something was behind him, but could never look behind him quick enough to see Jerry with a baseball bat/frying pan/grandfather clock ready to bash him. Imagine music between each frame going diddle diddle dee, as Smudge changes position.

Millie week 19

Daily Mirror, August 4 1990

Here's a period piece. 1990 was the year of Madchester and 'Baggy' - possibly the last time pop music ever came up with anything new and interesting - everything since has merely been a machine processed pastiche of what has come before. (Headline: Grumpy middle aged cartoonist declared modern pop music stagnant shock!)

The ecstacy-fuelled second summer of love had managed to drag on for a third year, left the fields around the M25 and had now gone mainstream in the pubs and clubs of provincial Britain, to the point where even The Daily Mirror had taken notice of rave culture. The costume Richard is wearing is actually a toned down version of the stuff one of the print apprentices at the branch of Kall-Kwik printing I was working at was wearing at the time - the trousers in particular are a perfect reproduction.

Fractals at the time were seen as a gateway to enlightenment. Today, of course, we use them to generate CGI explosions in Hollywood movies.

Phone-in

Self explanatory, and a rewrite of one of my old ones from 1982, a time when I was addicted to the late night phone-ins on LBC, London's commercial news radio station. Note the telephone, a late 80s push button BT Tribune - once again I've opted to draw a phone that looks like a phone rather than the anonymous white cordless box it would normally be these days.

Thank you to all the Comics.com refugees who have subscribed to the strip. I've gained an extra 60 subscribers in the last 36 hours, and It's great to see that lots of other Sherpa artists have seen their readership rise by similar amounts.

Feinites Barley!

Memories of the playground at St Peter's Church of England Primary School, Tunbridge Wells, inspired this one. Some little herbert would always attack you with the pinching and punching routine on the first of every month, protecting himself with the incantation 'and no returns' immediately after. Of course you'd ignore that and get your punch and kick back, and it would escalate from there into all out war.

I've never seen Bart Simpson do this, and you can usually rely on Matt Groening to remember all the playground lore there is and use it in either The Simpsons or his Life in Hell cartoons. Is this a particularly British thing?

This was originally meant to run on April 1st, but the switcheroo with Snow Sez took priority over it so this cartoon was bumped to today. That's why this is numbered 196 instead of 222 - it's running out of sequence.

Today is also the first day of GoComics merger with Comics.com. I'd like to welcome all the new readers who have found themselves unceremoniously shunted onto this strange new site with the unfamiliar navigation. It'll make sense once you get used to it, I promise, and GoComics are slowly but surely curing all the glitches - it broke down two weeks ago but it's almost back to its old functionality, and the Sherpa strips have returned to the email feed so at least I can be sure that everyone that does sign up for the strip now actually receives it.

If you're overwhelmed by the enormous choice of admittedly wildly variable material on Sherpa can I recommend the following:

Snow Sez by T Shephard (currently dormant but due to relaunch on June 6th. Every strip is a gem.)
In The Sandbox by Vicki Jackoby (also currently dormant but flares into joyous life every now and again)
Zootopia by Mike Wilson (consistently funny, as was his previous strip The Divine Comedy)
Glenview Revue by Rene Lopez (for his ability to suggest voluptuous roundness with the simplest of lines)
Featherweight by Chris Mountjoy (Funny and a truly luminous colour palette that makes every panel look like it's lit from behind)
Sooky Rottweiler by 'Cynthia' (A quirkily drawn animal strip from a unique French Canadian perspective)
Police Limit by Garey McKee (From the opposite side of the political spectrum to me but well written, beautifully drawn and cogently argued - you can't help but sympathise with Officer Pig.)

If you're a Sherpa cartoonist and you're not on this list don't be downhearted - there's lots of other great stuff on there but too much to take in in one go. If you have the time also try Mad Mouse, Frank and Steinway, Oranges are Funny, Wendle's Life, The Willies, Whisky Falls, Beardo, Mary B Wary, Devin Crane, 0-60, The House of Uncommons and Ten Cats - strips as different from one another as cheese is to a Kraft Single. I'll give them all one line reviews in another post a little later...