Smudge and Cholmondeley used to wear flea collars, and their fur never recovered properly from it. There’s always that phantom line around the neck where the collar used to be. Luckily, Smith is a cartoon cat so all he has to do is shake himself vigorously and his fur will return to normal, in the same way Tom from Tom and Jerry could do when smashed in the face with a saucepan/twisted into a pretzel/grated by a tennis racket/blown up by a bomb, etc.
Tag / collar
A pride of Smiths
Here’s a poser for you – how would you draw pride? We know the cartoon shorthand for things like speed and fear, but pride is a bit more difficult. I’ve gone for the DC Thompson solution – a few radiating lines and the word ‘Pride’ over Smith’s head.
Labels
Today’s strip is brought to you by Concerned Citizens of America or whatever nutty right-wing organisation is cluttering up my inbox with its ravings at the moment. The sad thing is, occasionally they have a point.
Note Smith’s phone number, which starts with a Hastings code and then goes unreadable because people actually ring numbers they find in comic strips.
The problem with the blog site disappearing for days on end seems to have been solved. A bit of advice – if your hosts give you a bit of web caching software for free and tell you it will make your website faster to load, don’t believe them. There is a reason why it is free. Avoid the W3-Cache plug-in for WordPress, folks.
Hegemony
A shout out to the original Patrick MacGoohan series The Prisoner here. And a slight problem with the positioning of the speech balloons in these Panavision frames – Smudge appears to be talking out of her bum. You’ll notice I switch to traditionally shaped square panels in Wednesday’s strip.
Oh, and I get to use the word ‘Hegemony’ here, which is a strange thing to be proud of, I know, but I am anyway.
12 years a cat
After 700 strips of cramped drawings two-up on A4 paper – it’s an enormous luxury to be able to stretch out and draw big again. It’s taking a bit of getting used to, hence the slightly hesitant line that you see here. But it’s coming back to me and I’m going to really enjoy drawing some intricate backgrounds when the story requires them again. For the moment, after two months of drawing landscapes and townscapes, I’m just setting everything indoors with the minimum of background. Sometimes I need the rest.
One-upmanship
Anything Smith can do, Jones can do better,
Jones can do anything better than Smith
Yes she can, yes she can,
Yes she can, yes she can,
Yes she can, yes she can, yes she caaaaaaaaaannnnn!
Collared
First of all, hello, and welcome to Smith.ink, Smith’s new home on the web. If you’re new here, ‘Smith’ is a cartoon strip about a cat called Smith. And that’s really all you need to know. If you really need to find out more, click on the menu in the sidebar or click on the folder icon to the top of the sidebar. To see the 700-odd cartoons that preceded this one visit smithcomic.blogspot.co.uk or www.gocomics.com/smith.
You’ve actually come in at the tail end of a storyline that has been going on since early July. Smith and his sister, Jones, escaped from a cattery while their owners were on holiday and spent most of the summer trying to find their way back home. Now they’ve finally reached home they’ve been rewarded for their efforts by being given ID collars. And they’re not popular. Now read on…