Tag / Jones

by Andrew Pilcher

Twitten

I love the colouring in this one. It’s a pity no-one will see it. See that bit of script at the bottom? That’s the new URL of the strip on Comics Sherpa. Yes, it’s that easy to find!

The steps I based this on run from the Beacon on the top of the West Hill, down to – you guessed it – Morrisons car park. Twittens and cat creeps criss cross all over Hastings. I’m constantly finding new ones. I’m of the belief that if you walk between any two points in Hastings and only use the roads, then there’s something deeply wrong with you.

by Andrew Pilcher

Glow

The sun reflecting off the windows of the terraces piled up on Hastings’ West Hill is truly a sight to behold.

I don’t have a photo of the actual phenomenon itself, but here’s another photo which will show you how intrusive Morrisons car park is in the views from everywhere else in Hastings. It’s a drone shot of Hastings at night. The crescent in the foreground is St Mary in the Castle, an arts venue in a converted church. The remains of Hastings castle are on top of the cliff, and the terraces and lawns of the West Hill lie behind it. That urine-yellow mass of lights top left is the Morrisons Car Park. Smith and Jones’ housing estate is roughly at the top, in the middle.

About six hours before this was posted GoComics announced that it was going to switch over to its much-threatened new website on the follwing Monday. After a year of hemming and hawing we Sherpa artists were given four days notice that we were to be temporarily evicted from the site, and dropped into a dark corner of the inernet where comments are impossible and search engines never dare venture. Luckily, I’d anticipated this and started an account at Tapastic where I began posting reruns.

To be honest, I’m angry that I’ve built up the comic to the point where it’s the most popular one on Sherpa, and the had that audience snatched from me because GoComics find it inconvenient to update the entire site in one go. In one fell swoop we were removed from the main site and removed from the email feeds and home pages of everyone that had subscribed to us. And we’ve not been given the faintest idea of when we’ll be back on the site and back in the system. And it’s that airy-fairy vagueness about what’s going to happen in the future that really pisses me off. I’m not convinced that they actually know what they’re going to do with Sherpa.

My official response can be seen in the next post.

Smith continues as a weekly strip appearing on Sundays until GoComics get their act together.

by Andrew Pilcher

Pulling the house down

The real house in question switched off its lights on January 1st, and then took six days to dismantle everything. The house is still standing.

by Andrew Pilcher

Bee dee dee… Bee dee dee

In my day job I work on the design and production side of a business-to-business news organisation. We don’t deal in politics really – only when it tangentally affects the civil engineering and construction industries. There was one point in the summer where we’d just voted for Brexit, politicians were resigning left right and centre, Donald Trump was finding a new minority group to belittle every day, and famous writers, artists and musicians were dropping dead in platoons. We had to switch off the news alerts on our phones as we couldn’t concentrate with them going off every ten minutes, bearing bad news each time…

by Andrew Pilcher

2016 in seven words

2016 was a year in which the human race seemed to take leave of its senses. We’re in for a wild ride in the next few years as the consequences of the stupid decisions we’ve made this year play through their inevitable courses. Stay safe, folks.

by Andrew Pilcher

Ahem!

People questioned what sarnies and rissoles are in the comments for this one.

Sarnies are a colloquial term for sandwiches, as in ham sarnies or cheese and pickle sarnies. Tounge sarnies are something altogether different.

In Britain a rissole is a sort of cross between a meatball and a burger, fried and sometimes covered in breadcrumbs.

by Andrew Pilcher

The real meaning of Christmas

In the interests of balance, here’s the other side of the Christmas equation…

by Andrew Pilcher

Space

I’m not happy with the light in the final frame, it’s dirty and not glowy enough. And I seem to have moved Hastings to somewhere in the vicinity of Brighton.

by Andrew Pilcher

Brownout

The light was better in this one. But people were far more interested in the Great British Bake-off in frame one.

by Andrew Pilcher

The grand switch-on

Every Christmas for the last few years or so, the house at the end of my cul de sac has had progressively larger and more elaborate Christmas decorations put up outside it in support of the St Michael’s Hospice in St Leonards. It started off fairly small, with a few illuminated trees and tube lights affixed to the side of the house. Last year they built a ski run down the side of the house. This year they had a river.

Here’s the BBC news report on it. You’ll have to click here to view it as I can’t embed it in the blog.

It even made The Sun.

Apart from the night of the big switch-on which attracted crowds so great that it was impossible to drive into my road, and the subsequent month-long drizzle of cars crawling by the house and paying no attention to their driving, there was little disruption to our lives. The lights faced the main street and disn’t disturb us, and I think they also had their own electricity supply provided for them. In the cartoon, I exaggerated the effect they had on their neighbours for comic effect.

It took several attempts to get the Spielbergian light effect I wanted. This was my first go, and it ended up as more of a glowing mist than the blast of light I wanted.