I’m glad to see that most of my readers recognized the tree as the one from the Peanuts Christmas special ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’.
Tag / Jones
Readymade
I see these trees in Hobby Lobby, and all I can think of is that this is what the war on Christmas looks like.
This year’s cat and Christmas Tree strip
It’s time to start Christmas, and as is traditional, here’s the annual remix of the cat and christmas tree strip. This time it’s just the beginning, as I thought I’d see what the consequences of Smith and Jones’ annual arboreal wrecking spree would be…
This year’s Christmas strips were written during lunch breaks sitting on the wellington Rocks in Tunbridge Wells. It’s a lovely place to sit and there are very few distractions so you can just let your mind wander and come up with gags. I’m currently writing this on an iPad at a kitchen table in Clovis NM, another place equally devoid of distractions. I’m hoping to get a good few months of gags written during my time here.
Interlude
In the 1950s, the BBC had a monopoly on TV. There was one channel and no competition until ITV began in 1956. So it didn’t have to try too hard. TV was on for maybe five or six hours a day and shut down for an hour at 6pm so you could put the kids to bed. Even those few scant hours didn’t get filled, there was plenty of time left over between programmes for pre-recorded interludes to be required to fill the gaps.
One of the most famous was The Potters Wheel – it was so popular that even people of my generation, born ten years too late to have ever seen it, had heard of it. It even spawned its own reality show this year.
The other fave was The Kitten. The set up was simple enough, a camera was pointed at a white kitten who was playing on a set with a chair, a waste paper bin, a bowl of milk and a ball of wool. It was the world’s first cat video. Click here to see the whole film.
Behind the sofa
This strip brought forth a lot of comments from my reglar readers – some had never heard of the phrase ‘behind the sofa’, while others brought forth memories of hiding from the monsters that appeared on the television in Doctor Who.
My period of hiding from the monsters would have been during Patrick Troughton’s reign as the Second Doctor. His main foes at the time were the Ice Warriors, the sibilant martians who pioneered Darth Vader’s respiratory problems – just the sound of their raspy breath would scare the willies out of me. The sofa was on legs so hiding behind it didn’t give the four-year-old me much protection from the space lizards in screen, so instead I hid in the dining room and waited for the hissing to stop.
Of course, Doctor Who was at its best when it scared you just when you weren’t expecting it. The one that really disturbed me was in Jon Pertwee’s second series. The Nestene Consciousness had returned, an entity with the power to control and animate anything made out of plastic. Normally it would send out showroom dummies to do its dirty business – creepy enough in themselves – but this time round it had spread its influence to household items and furniture. Remember those egg-shaped chrome and PVC chairs that were all the rage in the early 70s? We had one of those. So did a disposable guest actor in the show. The chair came to life and swallowed him like a fly in a venus fly trap. I didn’t sit in that chair again for a good two years.
The Grand Total
Mu-u-um!
Admit it, you’ve always wanted to do this to one of those annoying brats at the supermarket checkout, but you know that his would be the result.
This is what they want
Back to the plot after Friday’s hiatus. And it’s time to fill the screen with kittens. And who can compain about that?
Published two days late, though I don’t rememeber what the crisis was that caused the delay. It acsued the other two strips that week to follow on consecutive days.
Cage your babies
The views expressed in this comic strip are those of the cats and not necessarily those of the author. Actually, maybe they are – up to three minutes before I started drawing it I was planning on having the third panel showing a kitten with a semi automatic rifle and Smith and Jones appealing for self-defence for kittens. But there are quite enough nutters running around with guns and no sense of responsibility at the moment, so I toned the appeal down to one for play pens, or, as cats would see them, baby prisons. Sometimes its best not to let your characters dictate the plot for you…
The ubiquitous bear
Every year about this time a yellow bear infests the BBC with his cheery bonhomie and mysterious eye injury. It’s Pudsey the bear, the mascot of the BBC’s annual Children in Need appeal. It’s a very worthy cause, raising millions of pounds each year for the care of disadvantaged children all over the UK, but at the same time, whenever the BBC decides to plug one of ots pet projects the BBC does tend to overdo it a bit, blasting you with heart rending bear-related appeals using every medium at its disposal (and let’s face it, that means all of them!). So this year Smith and Jones have come up with their own counter appeal.