What?!?
Tag / Jones
Wild goose chase
The irony here is that I was cooking a duck for Sunday lunch while I was inking this strip in. Damn you ducks, why do you have to be so tasty?
Outboard motor
I’ve been sort of dreading drawing this set of strips with Jones on the toy yacht. It all looks deceptively simple but my main worries were
a) how to draw Jones clinging to the yacht and make it look convincing
b) how to convey the movement or the lack of movement in any particular frame
c) how to marry it all up with a landscape when I tend to draw everything straight-on from the side
and
d) how to show Jones using her tail as an outboard motor.
I think I’ve succeeded in the first three, but we’ll see if how I did in the fourth one when we see the comments on GoComics on Monday. If there are a lot of ‘what’s going on there?’ comments underneath the strip by the end of Monday I’ve failed.
DUN dun DUN dun DUN dun DUN dun…
Flappy thing!
Bowled over
There may not be a golf course in the real park, but there’s definitely a bowling green. Lawn bowls is sort of like curling on grass. A small ball (the jack) is chucked from one end of the green to the other, and then two people or teams compete to bowl their bowls as close to the jack as possible. The bowls are weighted on one side, so its possible for the bowls to take a curved path around obstacles in order to find the jack.
Its a slow but hypnotic game, perfect for a summer afternoon. I’ve never played, I don’t think I’m nearly old enough to be able to do that in any seriousness, but I love sitting on a park bench next to the green watching a game slowly unfold.
On the other hand…
Actually, I don’t understand the appeal of fishing either. The sitting by a lake bit makes sense, but not the hauling innocent creatures out of the water by a barbed hook bit.
Hole in one
I’m taking a few liberties with the geography of Alexandra Park, the gardens this set of strips is set in. It has a river running through the middle of it, a bandstand, ponds and lakes, tennis courts, a miniature railway, a bowling green, several events fields which get used for open air theatre, music festivals, and fetes, nature reserves, a waterfall, a chalybeate spring, a bandstand and a cafe, but no golf course. Hastings isn’t really a full-sized golf sort of town – we specialise in miniature golf instead. In fact, the World Crazy Golf Championships take place on the seafront every October.
Scrawlix
Scrawlixes are those symbols you see coming from off frame in the last panel, showing that there is some swearing going on but keeping everything nice and family-friendly for GoComics.
Once again, apologies for running so late with the blog – I’m concentrating on keeping the cartoon itself up to date, but find it’s usually past midnight on the morning day the strip goes up before I’m finished, so the blog tends to be a bit of an afterthought now.
Full disclosure, I’ve been diagnosed with diabetes and it means that sometimes I have days when I feel really fatigued. I’m not able to work into the night like I used to be able to. It’s being managed with tablets and dietary changes, and I’m feeling a lot better than I used to, but every now and again I eat something with some hidden sugar in it and that’s that for that night. Whatever happens, the strip will continue to appear on GoComics every Monday, Wednesday and Friday even if the blog goes quiet for a week or two at a time.
Pdoynnng!
