Glasto

Today's the first day of the 2011 Glastonbury Festival - three days of corporate sponsored peace, love and alternative music in a muddy field in Somerset. If the weather's being kind it can be fantastic. If it's not it tends to look like the scene you see here. And it looks like this year is going to be one of those years when it's going to be very very muddy. If you're going this year, good luck. Just sit in the first muddy puddle you find and remember that that will be the cleanest you feel all weekend.

To be honest it's much easier to watch the BBC's blanket coverage on the telly. That's what I'll be doing, unadventurous square sell-out that I am.

Smith the shred

This was Cholmondeley’s favourite trick - he loved to scratch at paper - the more important the better. My precious copy of 2000AD No 1 from 1977 (how geeky am I?) was destroyed by him a few years ago. His favourite stratching post was a pile of National Geographics - those yellow spines were so tempting. And don’t get me started on the subject of him and woodchip wallpaper.

There goes the sun

I like the colouring I did on this one - as the sky deepens and the sunlight reflected off Smith and Jones gradually reddens from frame to frame. Just one problem. The dialogue says that the sun has already set. Ooops. Let's pretend we haven't noticed, shall we?

Millie 21

Daily Mirror, August 18th 1990.

I was working to a six week deadline at the Daily Mirror, so this means that this would have been written as that year's Wimbledon was coming to an end.

Escalation

This is the end of this sequence, but not the end of this theme. Smudge's competitiveness will resurface from time to time.

Here we see Smudge's wall in context for the first time. It's a garden wall separating Smith and Jones' post war dwelling from the Victorian semis on the other side of the divide - not unlike the view outside my own living room to be honest, except in my case there's a small stream and a thicket of trees between my house and the garden opposite.

The church is a transplant from Tunbridge Wells. It's St Mark's C of E Church in Broadwater Down - I picked it because it has a very tall steeple. The churches in Hastings tend to be much older and stumpier, with low towers rather than steeples, and that would have ruined the joke.

The final think to note today is that if subscription rates keep rising at the rate they have been for the past couple of weeks both Snow Sez and Smith will probably break the 400 subscriber barrier on GoComics. As of now (12.20am) we're both at 396 subscribers... Not that I'm counting of course.

King of the Castle

When I was a kid we used to have a house which was more stairway than room. It was a mid victorian terrace set into the side of a hill, and the back half of the house was half a level down from the front half. Depending on how you looked at it, it either had six or three floors. There was a small window set into the wall at the top of the stairway, completely inaccessible from inside or outside the house. Except to one white fluffy cat, who could somehow manage to leap down from the roof onto the narrow window ledge six (or three) storeys up and then stare in through the window at us. No-one knows how he did it, but we seemed to be his favourite form of entertainment. Maybe he had a crush on our own cat, Sunday.

Chumley's obviously been taking lessons from that cat.

The bookcase Smudge is sitting on, in mine. It's from Ikea and is probably called 'Lundqvist'. The lampshade definitely isn't - it's probably available at the Bexhill Help The Aged charity store and called 'Doris'.

Status

When I first drew Smith in the 80s I never drew the whiskers onto the cats but I've added them in for this run. Every now and again my mind slips and the whiskers get left off. Sometimes I notice and add them in post production, when I'm doing the colouring. Sometimes I only notice a month after I've uploaded the strip to GoComics and I'm doing the blog. This is one of those times.

Thanks to Desmond Morris and his book 'Catwatching' for the seed that grew into the theme for this week's strips