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…
This is the first and last time you get to see Nigel’s mum, once the mall opens the strip stays resolutely work-focused.
For the uninitiated, these are eggy soldiers. The soldiers are the toast strips which you dip them into the yolk of the soft-boiled egg. The very idea of a runny yolk seems to revolt Americans – Linda soft boils my eggs under protest – but trust me, they’re delicious. The image shows a soft-boiled goose egg; now that’s just showing off.
Some gags just pop into my brain fully formed while sitting on the toilet. This is one of those gags. Now wash your hands.
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?
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.
We all know Thomas the Tank Engine – the slightly alarming human faced locomotive who lives on the island of Sodor with a lots of other fleshy-boilered rolling stock. There’s a heritage railway just down the road from my work which has Thomas weekends where they put faces on their locos and steam up and down the line from Tunbridge Wells to Eridge with carriages full of excitable kids and long suffering parents.
To us Brits, Thomas is synonymous with Ringo Starr, who has been narrating the kid’s animated TV show for 20 years or so. There are several generations of people now who are quite surprised to find he was once a drummer in some band or other.
In America, the same TV shows are shown, but they’ve been revoiced by George Carlin! I’m going to have to find this on YouTube – I’m having trouble imagining this.
It’s not the water that drives you mad… it’s the waiting!
Another regular character gets introduced here, though we won’t find out his name for a few weeks. (There’s a clue in the title of today’s post.)
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.
