A suitable end for this sequence of strips, leading to another set. Based on this…
Category / Smith
Peugeot 205
The final car in our concours d’elegance is the Peugeot 205 GTI from the mid 1980s, a hot hatch from the days when Peugeots were cool rather than the default option for people who need a car but just don’t care any more. Peugeots have become the Toyota Camrys of Europe, only much less reliable, sort of uninspired and stuffy. I have no idea how they can come from the same organisation that also produces the marvellously mad Citroens and DS’s. I covet a DS3 or a C4 Cactus but I’d never consider a Peugeot equivalent, which is strange bacsue their cars are essentially the same underneath.
Morris Minor
Today’s car is a Morris Minor ragtop from sometime in the 50s and 60s. The Morris Minor was a predecessor to the Mini, and if the live action movie of the Borrowers is to be believed, it was the only car that was available at that time.
The Borrowers wins the award for most gratuitous use of colour grading in a movie, with a colour palette seemingly based on the different kinds of mould you can find in a shower stall that has been left to rot for a few years. That’s definitely a British provincial high street you’re seeing there – so why are the cars driving on the wrong side of the road?
You can see lots of variants on the Minor in the picture above. There’s the wood framed Traveller, station wagon where the wood at the load-carrying end was actually structural rather than a stuck on decal. There’s a red GPO van, which at the end of their useful life you used to be able to buy for £10 at auctions – British indie bands couldn’t have survived without the ready supply of these in the 80s. And on the right, fourth one up, there’s a convertible.
We love convertibles in England. On those rare occasions that the sun does come out we tend to make the most of every fleeting moment of it, which is why we have more convertible cars per head than any other country in Europe. It’s the triumph of optimism over experience.
Note that I’ve drawn the car afresh in each panel – there’ll be none of that cut and paste stuff in my strip if I can possibly help it…
Renault Wind
Today’s car is the Renault Wind, a mid engined sports car from France. I think it was Renault’s tribute to the Lotus Europa, a mid engined British car from the 1970s, for which it provided the engines, and which was also styled like a bread van. It sold about three cars before it was pulled from the market, as no-one wanted a sports car they couldn’t see out of that was named after flatulence. There’s one that I see occasionally driving around Hastings – it has the dent in the offside front wing that is traditional to all French cars for some reason.
Lotus Europa
Renault Wind
Honda Jazz
One of the joys of living in a seaside town is the seagull lottery. Will your car be the one they use as a toilet, or will they aim for the blue BMW a few cars down? (For some reason, they always choose the BMW.)
This is my own Honda Jazz, a model known as a Fit in every other market – it would appear that its only the UK that objects to having a car named after uncontrolled muscle spasms. It’s grey, or, if you’re working in Honda UK’s marketing department, Urban Titanium.
It usually wins the seagull lottery at home, but at work, it’s less lucky. My parking space is under a row of lime trees which leak sap all over the cars underneath them, and once that bakes on it’s hard to shift. That, and there is a bird in the vicinity we all know as the atomic pigeon; I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.
Solarium Volvo
I was sat at my little drawing desk in my study, trying to think up an idea for for today’s cartoon, when a big blue estate car drew up and parked outside. I drew what I saw (editing slightly for clarity) and that’s what you see in the last panel.
This happy accident led to a full two weeks worth of cartoons on the same theme, as I swapped the car parked outside for something different each time.
Todays guest car is a Volvo estate. Yes, that’s what a Volvo looks like these days. Somehow it just doesn’t seem square enough.
Now trending…
Well, the box is there. Who can resist jumping into it?
Static
Thanks to ‘More cats than Sense’ who posted this .gif to the comments underneath today’s strip.
It’s hard work getting the peanuts to look uniform and random at the same time.
Peanuts
We get food parcels from the States occasionally – I think Linda’s folks think we still have rationing. They normally contain vital foods from the USA that you can’t get over here, like Skippy Peanut Butter (we can’t do peanut butter in the same way Americans can’t do cheese), and those two New Mexico staples, dried chilis and salsa from Sadie’s restaurant in Albuquerque. They come packaged in military grade packing, each jar wrapped in several layers of bubble wrap, then bound in fabric backed parcel tape and packed in a large box full of packing peanuts, which is then entirely wrapped with tape again. It takes about an hour to unpack them. We get to keep the contents and the cats get to jump into the box. And then we find packing peanuts all over the house for the next week or so.
Old Town
This one was drawn on the iPad, after the polls closed but before the results came in.
The drawing was traced over a photo of the Old Town taken from the West Hill – the Old Town nestles in a valley between the West Hill and the East Hill. Smith and Jones and the speech balloons were layered over the top and then the layered file were sent to my Mac for processing in Photoshop. The grass in the foreground, the sky, the sea and the gorse and brambles on the East Hill in the background were repainted, and the photograph of the buildings was filtered with the cut-out filter to create the hard-edged blocks of colour that match my colouring style.
And the results got published in the Hastings Independent at a huge size! And I was amazed at how good it looked (though the lettering needs attention).
The castle on the East Hill is actually the top station of the Victorian funicular railway that leads from the fishing beach to the top of the hill.