Squirt 2
Category / Smith
Paving Slabs
This will be familiar to anyone who has lived for any amount of time in Tunbridge Wells. The town had its own brickworks, which produced a particular kind of hard wearing red brick that turned out to be perfect for paving sidewalks with. Therefore, where most town would have used paving slabs, Tunbridge Wells had block paving. It has its advantages and its disadvantages. The advantages are that it looks great and it means that workment can reach the services underneathe the pavement by simply lifting the bricks and replacing them when they’re done. The disadvantages are that the bricklaying skills of the Victorian workmen that originally laid the pavements have nigh-on vanished in the 21st Century, and no-one has yet invented an app that can help today’s workmen lay new ones, and that every time it rains, a loose brick can mean you get a squirt of muddy water up the inside of your trouser leg when you step on it.
The Grand Total
Mu-u-um!
Admit it, you’ve always wanted to do this to one of those annoying brats at the supermarket checkout, but you know that his would be the result.
This is what they want
Back to the plot after Friday’s hiatus. And it’s time to fill the screen with kittens. And who can compain about that?
Published two days late, though I don’t rememeber what the crisis was that caused the delay. It acsued the other two strips that week to follow on consecutive days.
Script
This is a screen shot of the kind of script I used to write for the cartoon strip ‘Millie’ in the Daily Mirror for five years in the early 1990s. In those days I would have written the script on a black and white Mac SE, one of those all-in-one Macs with a screen the size of a smartphone, printed out two copies, kept one for myself and sent the other off to the cartoons and crosswords editor of MGN newspapers. He’d edit it, send the edited copy to the artist Roger Mahoney (now drawing Andy Capp) and six weeks later it would appear in the paper, sandwiched between The Perishers and Garth, and next to Russell Grant’s horoscopes.
This is very much how I would do it – while some of the writers in the Mirror would just supply dialogue and leave the artist to work out the layout I had been very much indoctrinated into the DC Comics method of working, having joined the London Cartoon Centre a few years beforehand and come under the influence of a lot of DC and Marvel A-Listers, in particular David Lloyd, Alan Moore and Paul Neary. I overwrote my panel descriptions in the same way that Alan Moore did, and was very much a subscriber to his auteur theory of comics.
It’s a Friday the Thirteenth strip today, so the dialogue I’ve used is exactly the same as I’ve used in every other Friday 13th strip.
Cage your babies
The views expressed in this comic strip are those of the cats and not necessarily those of the author. Actually, maybe they are – up to three minutes before I started drawing it I was planning on having the third panel showing a kitten with a semi automatic rifle and Smith and Jones appealing for self-defence for kittens. But there are quite enough nutters running around with guns and no sense of responsibility at the moment, so I toned the appeal down to one for play pens, or, as cats would see them, baby prisons. Sometimes its best not to let your characters dictate the plot for you…
The ubiquitous bear
Every year about this time a yellow bear infests the BBC with his cheery bonhomie and mysterious eye injury. It’s Pudsey the bear, the mascot of the BBC’s annual Children in Need appeal. It’s a very worthy cause, raising millions of pounds each year for the care of disadvantaged children all over the UK, but at the same time, whenever the BBC decides to plug one of ots pet projects the BBC does tend to overdo it a bit, blasting you with heart rending bear-related appeals using every medium at its disposal (and let’s face it, that means all of them!). So this year Smith and Jones have come up with their own counter appeal.
Bam! Krakk!
I haven’t updated this blog for a while – huge apologies for that. It’s been a hectic Autumn and I’ve been concentrating on making sure the strip is always updated on GoComics rather than posting on this blog. But now I have a holiday in the States coming up, spending Christmas with Linda’s family, so that’ll give me the chance to catch up.
I’m writing this on my new iPad pro. Yes, I’ve finally given in to temptation and bought a tablet. Why did I wait until now? Because up to now tablets have just been about consuming material rather than creating it. The Pro comes with a huge screen, a cover that concerts into a real keyboard, and best of all, a stylus which means I can start drawing straight onto the screen as if I was drawing on paper. That is going to save me so much time – not only that the 4G Sim card means I’ll be able to draw or post whenever I get a snatched moment no matter where I am.
I’ll be catching up at a succession of different airports on the way to Albuquerque, so expect to see a lot of posts suddenly appearing on Saturday 12th December.
Guy Fawkes night… That seems such a long time ago. Note the properly drawn fireworks explosions in this year’s Bonfire Night strips. Up to now I’ve tried to recreate fireworks using Photoshop filters but was never happy with the effect they made. Now I’ve gone back to basics, using a combination of ink and a ballpoint Tipp-ex applicator to create these explosions full of Kirby crackle. I think they’re much more in style with the rest of the drawing.
Hard hat
