Well, the box is there. Who can resist jumping into it?
Now trending…
Well, the box is there. Who can resist jumping into it?
Tag / Smith
Static
Thanks to ‘More cats than Sense’ who posted this .gif to the comments underneath today’s strip.
It’s hard work getting the peanuts to look uniform and random at the same time.
Peanuts
We get food parcels from the States occasionally – I think Linda’s folks think we still have rationing. They normally contain vital foods from the USA that you can’t get over here, like Skippy Peanut Butter (we can’t do peanut butter in the same way Americans can’t do cheese), and those two New Mexico staples, dried chilis and salsa from Sadie’s restaurant in Albuquerque. They come packaged in military grade packing, each jar wrapped in several layers of bubble wrap, then bound in fabric backed parcel tape and packed in a large box full of packing peanuts, which is then entirely wrapped with tape again. It takes about an hour to unpack them. We get to keep the contents and the cats get to jump into the box. And then we find packing peanuts all over the house for the next week or so.
Old Town
This one was drawn on the iPad, after the polls closed but before the results came in.
The drawing was traced over a photo of the Old Town taken from the West Hill – the Old Town nestles in a valley between the West Hill and the East Hill. Smith and Jones and the speech balloons were layered over the top and then the layered file were sent to my Mac for processing in Photoshop. The grass in the foreground, the sky, the sea and the gorse and brambles on the East Hill in the background were repainted, and the photograph of the buildings was filtered with the cut-out filter to create the hard-edged blocks of colour that match my colouring style.
And the results got published in the Hastings Independent at a huge size! And I was amazed at how good it looked (though the lettering needs attention).
The castle on the East Hill is actually the top station of the Victorian funicular railway that leads from the fishing beach to the top of the hill.
Doom
It’s hard to appreciate just how awful the European referendum campaign was. Both sides were making apocalyptic predictions about what would happen if the other side won. All of the claims except the last one were made in all seriousness by one side or the other. And of course, in the end we just continued on as normal – the pound tanked but it was possibly overvalued at that point anyway. Apart from a hangover and the creeping feeling that this has become a smaller, meaner country nothing much has happened yet. We shall see what happens in the next few years…
T h e l o n g e s t d a y
And yes – the solstice was on the 20th this year instead of the 21st. You’ve got a leap year to thank for that.
By their fruit shall ye know them
Denizens
Hmm. Beard? Check. Mad hair? Check. Zany shirt? Check. ‘Interesting’ spectacles? Check. Hat? Check. That’s me, that is!
The main floor of the Observer Building doesn’t have a catwalk, so excuse the artistic licence, I’ve added one so the cats can observe, without being observed themselves. It also helps convey the post-industrial vibe of the place.
Gotham
This is the back of the Observer Building. You can reach it by either driving half a mile from the front door in a circuitous route that takes you from the top of the cliff to the bottom – or you can walk down a set of stone stairs at the side of the building. The graffiti strewn fire-escape bedecked space at the back is known as Gotham Alley, and is often used for street festivals.
I’d better explain some of Chumley’s incantations. Open Seame and Abracadabra are obvious enough, but Izzy wizzy let’s get busy is the catchphrase of Sooty, a beloved glove puppet of a bear that has been entertaining children since 1948. I used to watch Sooty avidly on the telly and he gave me my first taste of the stage when I was a child, when I was invited to go up on stage to meet him and Harry Corbett during a live show in Tunbridge Wells.
Alaam kazaar (as I remember it) was the incanation of Fareik the Magician in Hanna Barbera’s Arabian Knights, an animated segment of the Banana Splits show.
Of course, in Britain, the magic words that will get you into any house party is ‘We’re friends of Dave‘ as there’s guaranteed to be a Dave there. A party isn’t a party without a certified Dave present.
The referendum was still a week away. And that particular incanation is more likely to make doors slam in your face than anything else.
Note that Smith has noticed the window in the second frame, and it’s there, open, in plain sight in the penultimate frame. And aren’t the colours lovely? This is one of those strips where everything worked.
The Observer Building
I took some reference photos to get the backgrounds right for this strip. The backgrounds to frames 1 and 3 are of the stuccoed fronts of Cornwallis Gardens, a Victorian development of grand houses around a triangular green space that has now sadly gone to seed. It’s got that combination of grandeur and squalour which is very Hastings. If you look very hard at the trees in the background you’ll be able to see a wino shouting at an empty can of Special Brew.
Turn 180 degrees and you’ll see this glazed tiled pile – another example of derelict grandeur – The Observer Building.
Once upon a time it was the home of the local paper, Hastings Observer, with the offices you see here on the street level at the front. The building was built on the edge of a cliff, so it drops away two further levels at the back, which was where the printing presses used to be. It’s now being used as a multi-purpose arts space, high on quirk and character but severely lacking as a performance space in my opinion. It’s a great space for a party or a ‘happening’ though, and I’ve used its coffee shop a few times when I’m working on Smith scripts.
Here’s the website for it. Caution: it may contain toxic levels of whimsy.
Why the crowd outside? They’re all waiting for a fashion show to open.