Scritch Scritch
Bullet time
Recreating a few of Keanu Reeves’ iconic freeze-frame poses from the Matrix. Every movie for the next few years sped up and slowed down their action scenes at random in a me-too fashion, mainly because digital editing software had just become available and every editor in Hollywood was using it for no other reason than because it was there.
Agent Smith
There was an Agent Smith in the movies, played by Hugo Weaving. It’s OK, I can reveal he’s a virus. It’s not like it’s a spoiler – the films are 18 years old now! And besides, after the first one they became incomprehensibly muddled anyway. If I remember correctly, in the last movie they saved the universe by switching it off and switching it back on again.
Number nine
Number nine? It’s 1001 in binary.
This strip was inspired by this couple of buildings in Manchester.
In my day job I put together a magazine and website called New Steel Construction, and in our June edition we did a feature on the buildings, which were part of a redevelopment called The Embankment (click here to read more about it if steel-framed buildings are things that really float your boat). I liked the numbers that had been put on the top of them, and the fact that they looked like the binary I and 0 that appear on on/off switches. So, as well as being read as 100 and 101 they could be read as 4 and 5. The fact that strip 1000 showed Jones being aware that she is in a comic strip melded with the binary, and we ended up with a series of strips where Jones thought she was in the Matrix.
The colour scheme changes after the last panel of this strip, to reflect the eerie green grading that was used in the Matrix movies. The grainy green background remains until Jones snaps out of it five strips later.
1000!
As ever, I’m desperately trying to catch up on the blog, having put all my energy into keeping the GoComics site where all these strips get premiered up-to-date. It’s late November 2016 as I write this, so I have three packed months to catch up on. In that time I’ve played FDR in Annie at the White Rock Theatre in Hastings (a lot of the following strips will have been drawn during rehearsals or between entrances during the show), made a whistlestop trip to the States to attend my Mother Law’s funeral, and attended the death throes of American democracy. I would have updated the blog while I was in the States, if only I could remember the password for WordPress! So here I am doing it now.
It’s strip number 1000! I thought I’d go all meta for a bit…
Nine nine nine
And this one is a lot of story threads being joined together and becoming something else entirely. Obviously this is a left over from the Olympics, but it was also going to be used to herald a big change to the strip as well, which has now been postponed until after the millennial celebrations of Strip 1,000 on Monday.
Don’t worry, it’s not a big fundamental change like what has been happening to Girth over the past few weeks. Instead I’ll be making a popular occasional character a regular, something I’ve been working up to for a couple of years now…
All will be revelaed in a couple of weeks’ time…
Peek at you
This week is very much made up of left over gags from other weeks, being used as filler while the counter in the corner of the top right frame ticks its way up to the big 1,000. So here’s a gag from the long grass series that was too good to waste. Originally a kangaroo was going to appear in the penultimate panel, but in between the writing and the drawing of this strip, Pokemon Go took off, so I replaced the Roo with a Pikachu, and the gag became about ten times better.
Scone
The eternal question: how do you pronounce ‘scone’. Some say it should be pronounced as it is spelled: ‘scone’. Others think ‘sconn’ is correct. Personally, I don’t mind either, so long as it’s covered in lots of clotted cream and strawberry jam.
Thanks to Daisy Estall, who posed this question on her facebook feed. The consensus was that it should be ‘scone’. To rhyme with ‘scone’.
Hammer toss
Lawn Tennis
That’s one of our Hastings fishing boats in the final panel. The real boat is pictured to the right. Photo by Tony Bates. Buy a canvas print here.