Pdoynnng!
Tag / playground
Margery Daw
See saw
Apologies for the lateness of this post. Today’s strip didn’t actually get drawn until today. I’ve got some serious catching up to get on with. Blame Eurovision and the Comics Con the next day.
Aquired
I didn’t realise that I had spelled the word ‘acquired’ incorrectly until after I had scanned in the artwork. Can you spot the repair job I did?
Today’s guest dog is a Pyrenian Mountain Dog (probably spelled incorrectly as well).
Torpedo Jones 2
Jones has form as a feline torpedo. See the sofa series of cartoons from a couple of years ago. Now she’s found a much better launch pad – though it does have the disadvantage that you can’t aim it – you just have to wait for the target to wander in front of the slide.
Slide, Jones, slide!
Today’s web address guest font (because Adobe’s Creative Cloud font servers were playing up) is Arial New. We shall return to Adobe Enzo on Wednesday as I’ve now repaired the problem.
Last week we had the first continuous background since I moved to the new square format – today we have an animated .gif, which is usually a guaranteed way of getting your strip picked for the Pick of Sherpa feature on the GoComics Blog. I don’t do them often but sometimes they really help with a gag.
And yes, the slide has been reversed. Cartoon slides do that – they automatically point in the direction of the gag. In this case Jones is going down the slide and as we in the west read comics from left to right, she needs to be going in that direction.
Sister Act went down really well, thanks for asking. Even better than the show (even though that was fabulous) was the action going on in Dressing Room 2, which became a home from home for its four inhabitants. By the second day we had set up our dressing room as a Zen temple of peace and spent the time between appearances on stage listening to whalesong and meditating on the colour blue…
In the mirror to the left, Stewart Farmer, playing the villain of the piece, Curtis, while I am in the right hand mirror, playing Monsignor O’Hara.
After a couple of days the mood in the dressing room changed, and by the last night we had given the room a makeover and turned it into a pub.
Here’s the pub. Note the optics on the shelf, and the scampi fries on the wall. Plus bar snacks and beer towels on the counter. What you can’t see is the laser light display playing on the ceiling or the beer garden we made out of the fire escape outside, and the pub sign I drew for the door outside – The Cock and Bishop. L-R. myself, Stewart’s daughter, Stewart Farmer (Curtis), Steve Pickering (Joey, the henchman), Gareth Brighton (Eddie, a cop) and our guest barmaid Alex Tomlins (Tina, one of Deloris’s backing singers).
Finally, here’s a canvas of everyone in the dressing room, that hung on the wall. Caricature is not one of my natural talents, but everyone seemed to like it.
Scappetty scappetty
Scappetty Scappetty is my attempt to get that Hanna Barbera running on the spot sound effect that used to accompany Shaggy and Scooby just before they would POW off into the distance.
Once again, the slide is from memory. Nowadays no slide that looks like this would be allowed to be built. I mean, look at it. Height, ladders, steep drops, all metal construction… it’s a death trap! Most slides nowadays are half the size, a quarter of the gradient and built into the sides of artificial grassy hillocks. No self respecting kid would be seen dead using them.
Playground
The playground I’m drawing is the one I used to play on when I was a kid in the Grove in Tunbridge Wells. That even goes down to the equipment which I’m drawing from fourty year old memories. There was a climbing frame, a roundabout, a seesaw and two sets of swings – one for babies and another for older children – all set into a rectangle of the hardest tarmac that the council could find. They’ve all changed now, as the old playground was obviously a death trap, and I only survived to the age of nine by sheer luck. The new playground can be seen in the photo below – everything is padded, coned off and guarded to the point that there’s really no point in playing on it any more. They’ve even replaced the tarmac with bizarre rubber stuff.
The playground at The Grove, Tunbridge Wells (right of picture)
Swings and roundabouts
This weeks strips were pencilled and drawn during the band call for Sister Act – that wonderful moment when the musical you’ve been rehearsing for the past few months suddenly gets an orchestra playing along instead of a plinky plonky piano. So, not counting the colouring, these all got put together in under three hours (with occasional breaks for singing and timing orchestral tags behind dialogue).
