Tag / Jones

by Andrew Pilcher

Guy Fawkes

Smith-Pilcher-715-1411103It’s Guy Fawkes’ Night on the Fifth, and people have been having fireworks parties all week. We take them really seriously in Sussex, bonfires and fireworks have been taking place all over the county over the past month. The big one happens in Lewes on Wednesday. Hastings traditionally celebrates its own bonfire night on the Saturday nearest the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, and this year’s effigy was of a bus, because we don’t want the bus services around town to be cut. Yes. If there’s anyone out there who understands the logic of that please let me know what it is…

Guy was part of a Catholic plot to blow up James I and restore a Catholic monarch to the throne. Yes, even then terrorist nutters were using religion as an excuse for killing people.

Guy (or Guido to use the name he adopted when fighting for the Spanish in the Eighty Years War) has become a romantic figure of late – helped by the film of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. His mask has since become the millennial equivalent of a Che Guevara t-shirt – it’s what you wear when you want to vent a half formed political opinion against the powers-that-be. Well, it’s either that or join UKIP. To be honest I think I prefer the mask…

The dog behind the mask is the perennial activist Beebee from ‘Sooky Rottweiller’. And that’s the last guest star I’ll be using for a while – I feel I’ve been overdoing them lately.

Potted biographies of the pariahs Smith mentions in frame 4:

Jimmy Saville
Sepp Blatter
Piers Morgan

by Andrew Pilcher

Scenes from the Sherpa Halloween Party

Smith-Pilcher-714-141031Mutter mutter… when I was a kid… mutter mutter… commercialisation of Halloween… mutter mutter… racks of flammable Halloween costumes made from petrochemicals in supermarkets… mutter mutter… Haribo bogies… mutter mutter… imported American customs bastardising our perfectly good European ones… mutter mutter… trick or treat… mutter mutter… I blame ET… mutter mutter…

Cats have plenty of connections to Halloween, so it’s fine for them to celebrate October 31st. But there’s no need for them to wear a costume.

Note that Chumley, bless his gentle hearted soul, doesn’t quote get the idea of Halloween and is wearing a pair of Mickey ears, mainly because Alison Ward is wearing them at the Halloween party in her strip.

by Andrew Pilcher

Typewriter

Smith-Pilcher-713-141029We haven’t seen Archie for a bit – so here he is, just in time for Halloween. Archie is a cockroach, and like all cockroaches he is a poet who types on an old-fashioned typewriter. Jones would be his Mehitabel if only she realised there was a cockroach typing the messages she finds – but for some reason she thinks it’s a possessed typewriter instead.

by Andrew Pilcher

Fall backwards

Smith-Pilcher-712-141027I’ve never quite understood why the clocks have to go back in the winter. Winter is gloomy enough without us having the evenings made even darker by government edict. Even in the south of England we’re on roughly the same latitude as Labrador, so the sun sets at half past three in December. In Scotland it’s even worse – one of the main planks of their independence campaign this year was to have the ability to set their own time zone.

by Andrew Pilcher

Heccilopters

711-141024The seed pods from Sycamore trees have a fascinating aerodynamic profile which causes them to spin in a leisurely fashion down to the ground. I was sitting in on a park bench during my lunch break jotting down a couple of weeks with of strip ideas into my notebook when I noticed that I was sitting directly underneath one and was being bombarded by the things.

So how would Jones cope with one of these in her garden?

by Andrew Pilcher

Daddy Longlegs

710-141022In Britain a Daddy Longlegs is a Crane Fly, and not an arachnid. It’s got a small body and long spindly legs, which Wikipedia describe as ‘deciduous’ as they have a habit of falling off. Every autumn they fly into our house and, being flies, flop around ineffectually trying to find their way out again. Billy and Bella go mad chasing after them. Oh, and that story about Daddy Longlegs having the strongest venom known to man but no fangs is not true – if it was my cats would have overdosed on them long ago.

I don’t often use fonts in my cartoon, but I made an exception in this case, as I wanted to create The Daddy Longlegs of The Apocalypse, so you can imagine the speech ‘I may not be a spider but I am in league with the spiders…’ being delivered in a Russell Crowey Liam Neesony sort of voice.

As for the idea of spiders and insects being in league? A tip of the hat to Bill Bailey for that.

by Andrew Pilcher

This is all perfectly normal

709-141020Remember, there is no global warming. Those hundred-year flood events that happen every five years? – they are perfectly normal. Those ‘Britain to be battered by hurricane’ headlines that appear every week on the front page of the Daily Express? Nothing to worry about. Those daffodils appearing in December? La la la la not listening.

This did not happen.

This did not happen.

by Andrew Pilcher

One-upmanship

701-141001

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!