We don’t see many illuminated inflatables in Britain, but I see a lot of them in Clovis, NM. There’s something sad about them during the day – deflated Santas lying collapsed on a front lawn made of straw.
Category / Smith
Space
I’m not happy with the light in the final frame, it’s dirty and not glowy enough. And I seem to have moved Hastings to somewhere in the vicinity of Brighton.
Brownout
The light was better in this one. But people were far more interested in the Great British Bake-off in frame one.
The grand switch-on
Every Christmas for the last few years or so, the house at the end of my cul de sac has had progressively larger and more elaborate Christmas decorations put up outside it in support of the St Michael’s Hospice in St Leonards. It started off fairly small, with a few illuminated trees and tube lights affixed to the side of the house. Last year they built a ski run down the side of the house. This year they had a river.
Here’s the BBC news report on it. You’ll have to click here to view it as I can’t embed it in the blog.
It even made The Sun.
Apart from the night of the big switch-on which attracted crowds so great that it was impossible to drive into my road, and the subsequent month-long drizzle of cars crawling by the house and paying no attention to their driving, there was little disruption to our lives. The lights faced the main street and disn’t disturb us, and I think they also had their own electricity supply provided for them. In the cartoon, I exaggerated the effect they had on their neighbours for comic effect.
It took several attempts to get the Spielbergian light effect I wanted. This was my first go, and it ended up as more of a glowing mist than the blast of light I wanted.
‘Amphibious trials were less conclusive’
I like being able to put sentences like that into a cartoon strip about cats. It makes me strangely content.
Ptui
The sound effect ‘Ptui’ is taken from Peanuts. Not too sure where ‘Glom’ came from, though.
This is one of those four panel narratives where everything is a direct consequence of the previous panel and the action just flows in a satisfying way. And it has my usual wet liberal message about the futility of aggression.
Camouflage
I intended this just to be about Sandy seeing something that looks like a stick and chasing after it. But some people saw something more in it – Sandy seeing the twig as a tree, turning this into a pee joke in an unseen fifth panel. It’s actually a better punchline so I’ll let that interpretation go by uncontested. And we can add it to the long list of strange correlations between this strip and Donald Trump’s presidency.
Mauser
I mourn the loss of comments on GoComics. There were many good comments about this one, including one about the gun that provided the headline for this post. And now they’ve all evaporated in GoComics redesign. Lets hope that when we return to the main site (assuming civilisation lasts that long) they get reinstated.
Pun run
I thought this was a throwaway joke, but it grew into something much more. To my surprise it proved to be very popular, and then the invention of the tank provided enough jokes to keep me going up to the big Christmas storyline.
Return to Fort Jones
Written and drawn while I was in the States during the final surreal stages of the election. Was I inspired by an urge to hide behind a bunch of cushions until the tartrazine demagogue went away? Not really. I was inspired by being in a house which contained a dog, a sofa and lots of cushions. And I had an idea for a very bad pun which needed to be set up today…
And no, I don’t know how Sandy got in the house.