by Andrew Pilcher

100m dash

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I had an accident with a bottle of Dr Pepper and a graphics tablet on the Sunday I drew this. It completely fritzed my graphics tablet and left me with no means to colour the strip so this black and white version had to be posted instead.

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It ended up looking a lot better than I expected, but Jones and Smudge look undentical unless they’re coloured, so I don’t think I’ll ever be reverting to black and white, no matter how much time it may save.

I thought this was going to be a fairly standard joke about Scrumpy’s ears, so I wasn’t ready for the response it got. It appears that on the same day this was published, Shaunae Miller of the Bahamas beat Allyson Felix of the USA in the 400m track event in the most unusual fashion – she dived over the line. If the winner of the race is the first person to get a bodypart over the line, both Scrumpy and Shaunae won fair and square. In my opinion it’s just as valid as dipping at the line, and everyone does that.

 

by Andrew Pilcher

Swimming

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Yes, the butterfly is a Monarch – or as I thought when I found a reference photo on Google Images, a generic red butterfly. It turns out that it’s been blown a good 3,000 miles off course.  I should have gone for one of these instead, a Red Admiral.

I was sorely tempted to colour the water in the pool an opaque green colour, to match the diving pool in Rio, but in the end I stuck to the more typical livid turquoise. Look at that pool. Are you supposed to dive in it or play hockey on it?

by Andrew Pilcher

Fencing

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As they say on the game show Catchphrase, say what you see.

by Andrew Pilcher

High Jump

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The 2016 Olympics have started in Rio, and once again the cats are holding the backyard Olympics in the garden. It’s useful to have a set subject to write about sometimes. It’s also good to have any other sport than football to write about – I ignored the European Cup completely this year. So, it turned out, did the England team.

Who knew we were going to do so well this year? I was fully expecting us to have the hubris Olympics this time round, turning up expecting to get all the medals after our performance in the London Olympics and then choking on everyone of them. I was very glad to be proved wrong. Of course, half the Russian squad being in rehab helped, but even so…

by Andrew Pilcher

Dandelions

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I remember rehearsing a show with the West Kent Youth Theatre in the open air one summer. It was a beautiful day, so we were using a tiled quadrangle next to West Kent College’s science block, which was downwind of a field of dandelions which had just come into seed. The wind got up and we were suddenly breathing dandelions…

by Andrew Pilcher

Marketing

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by Andrew Pilcher

Buttercup

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You can tell that I was sitting on some rocks in the middle of a grassy meadow when I was writing this batch.

The legend is that if you can see the gold reflected under your chin, then you like butter. Which is a bit pointless, when you think about it. Surely it would be better to hold 500g of Kerrygold under your chin, and then eat the Kerrygold.

I’m being pulled in two directions at the moment. The Hastings Independent has a preference for biting satire, something I only occasionally indulge in, as the last thing I want is for the strip to turn into a bitter whine-fest like Mallard Filmore. So, contrarian that I am, I did a week of gentle cutesy humour, in the way that sitting in a grassy meadow only can, and then didn’t bother to submit them to them. Instead I sent the following week’s three Olympic strips, and all three of them got printed.

by Andrew Pilcher

Who goes there?

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I’ve rendered the grass more successfully here. If you look you’ll see that I forgot to add the sound effects and had to add them in at the colouring stage.

by Andrew Pilcher

Knocked into the long grass

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The plan was that I would take a week off and post some easy to draw cartoons. You know the ones – the kind that just involve eyes in darkness or a heavy fog. In this case, watching some dogs leaping around in the long grass surrounding the Wellington Rocks in Tunbridge Wells led to this week’s crop of strips, but I didn’t realise how time consuming long grass was going to be to colour and make look good enough. This was my first attempt and it wasn’t quite right – the grass is too green.

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Lumps of sandstone are an important part of my creative process. Once a week (weather permitting) I’ll spend a lunch break up on these rocks on Tunbridge Wells common, and sit down with a notebook and write a week’s worth of strips (two if I hot a rich seam of comedy coal). The rocks overlook a clearing full of long grass, and a cricket pitch which occasionally has a game being played on it. Dog walkers exercise their hounds there, lovers carve their names in the soft rock, and during the school holidays, the rocks are crawling with children. Of course, being brought up in Tunbridge Wells, I spent a fair amount of my childhood there too, and have left behind a few initials. Near the summit can be found the cryptic word ‘Gnomefumbler’, the name of the grammar school comedy art-rock band I was a non-musician in back in 1980.

Hastings has its own sandstone outcrops, but as they form the cliff face underneath the castle I’ve never really taken to them. In Hastings my preferred writing spot is the pier, because they have tables there and you can get coffee.