Don’t you wish you could stretch like a cat? If I ever did it like that there would be bits of vertebrae pinging off in all directions!
Category / Smith
Selfish
I have been known to take the very occasional selfie, but it’s usually one taken at my desk rather than one taken with a mobile phone (mainly because I refuse to have a mobile phone), and it has to have a purpose, like the Children in Need ears one I posted on Facebook last month.
Cartoon characters however, live their entire life framed. Hence Smith’s realisation that he thinks, therefore he selfies. It’s ended up as a rather Warholian strip that would make a pretty good poster…
So, where do you get all your crazy ideas from?
Some gags just pop into my brain fully formed while sitting on the toilet. This is one of those gags. Now wash your hands.
Teabagging
I always enjoy drawing a Jones’ banishment strip. They always follows the same pattern: Jones finds something interesting and plays with it like any normal cat would, and then in the last frame we find her banished from the house, sitting on the front step of the house, giving a perfectly reasonable explanation of why she behaved like she did. I’m on her side, as I am with any annoying five year old kid who, when he asks why he should change his behaviour, gets told ‘because I say so’. (You can tell I don’t have any children, can’t you.)
I drink a lot of tea at work. It’s normally PG Tips, the brand that comes in pyramidal teabags, recommended on the telly by knitted chimps. But every now and then I go through a herbal infusion phase. When I wrote this I was heavily into Pukka Herbs’ Three Mint Tea, a delicious infusion of peppermint, spearmint and fieldmint. And these are the kind of teabags that come with a tab and a string, so you can remove the teabag from your mug of hot water without having to use a spoon. They’re very dangly, and they smell rather like cat mint. How could Jones resist?
Not a sock
Normally, you would yell at someone to ‘put a sock in it’ when you want them to shut, but that probably wouldn’t appear too visually comprehensible when drawn poking out of the ceiling. It wouldn’t be very watertight either. hence the change of the sock to a cork, still a phase that’s used quite often, but not one I’d automatically reach for.
I drew an old fashioned incandescent bulb in frame three rather than a low energy one for much the same reason.
Water torture
It’s not the water that drives you mad… it’s the waiting!
Plip!
Originally I drew this with Jones being the one the drops of water landed on – but halfway through inking I changed my mind. So there’s been a bit of serious Photoshop work going on with this one, swapping the smooth and fuzzy tails around, and removing the markings from Jones and putting them on Smith instead.
This week’s cartoons were drawn and inked in the Foyer of the White Rock Theatre, Hastings, during performances of Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s Carousel by my drama group, the Hastleons. I hate Carousel with a vengeance, it’s like someone came up with a checklist of everything that can be bad about musical theatre and then built a show around it. So I opted to forgo appearing in this show and worked front of house instead, selling programmes. Once the audience was in the auditorium and the soundproof doors were safely closed I cleared the programme table and sat down and pencilled the next three week’s worth of strips.
Incidentally, Carousel was apparently an excellent production. The audience loved it. I tried, but I only managed to get halfway through the first act before I had to leave. Nothing wrong with the performances, but the show itself makes me want to projectile vomit.
Meet the siblings
Actually it’s my birthday today, but Smith and Jones get to share it. And you get to see the rest of the family for the first time (though you only get to see Taylor and Browne as kittens).
Smith and Jones are the first and second most common surnames in the UK – Taylor and Browne come third and fourth respectively. Madgwick-Blenkinsop-Delarue-Jenkins sounded like a firm of solicitors or accountants, so I made him a mouser in the archives department of an old fashioned firm of lawyers. I’ve been in rooms like this – smelling of ancient parchment and festooned with faded pink ribbon. I’ve even met the cat.
Sea Fog
Sea fog is funny stuff. It comes rolling in off the sea and then decides to stop, and there’s a sharply defined edge to where it starts and stops. I’ve been driving down the seafront in Hastings on the seaward side of the road in thick fog, while being able to see that the cars passing on the other side of the road are still in bright sunlight.
The first time I visited San Francisco I was lucky enough to be sifting on top of one of the Twin Peaks at dusk, just as the fog started rolling in from the Pacific. It was quite magical – the fog rolled over the Sunset district, up the escarpment to the peaks, and then divided into three as it rolled around the two summits, and flowed down the other side to the Castro. In five minutes I was sitting under a clear starry sky on a small island in a sea of clouds, with just a few other islands and telecoms towers poking out of the mist. Jones is doing her best impersonation of the Twin Peaks in the last frame.
Oh what a lovely war
We’ve been saturated in khaki this autumn, what with it being the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. There’s been a strange mixture of disgust at the horrors of war and military sentimentality and hero worship. Much as I respect our armed forces I’m finding the commemoration of the centenary is slowly morphing into a celebration of the slaughter, and that leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.