Hammer toss
Tag / tail
Fluff
Thwip!
When we first discovered that Sunday had injured her tail and was bleeding all over the sofa, we improvised a bandage of our own to try to stem the flow before we took her to the vets. Of couse she coyldn’t feel anything, but she knew there was an unwanted weight at the end of her tail. So, using the remaining working muscles at the base of her tail she just gave the tail a swift flick and sent the sodden bandage flying across the room, much like what you see in panel two. After the third attempt we gave up – she was treating it as a game and her aim was getting better.
It’s a drag
Note the burnt-out hoverboard in the pile of discarded wheeled things.
Remix 2
Once again, a remix of an old Millie strip – in this case it’s the last one from this sequence…
If there’s anyone who is unfamiliar with Millie, the strip I wrote for the Daily Mirror in the 1990s (so that’ll be all of you, then) you can find scans of the first few years of it on the old blog, starting HERE.
Remix
Actually a remix of this old Millie strip from 1991…
But it’s good to get a chance to draw Jones doing something other than one of the six stock poses*. I’m trying to get more variety into how I draw the cats, and maybe, after much experimentation, I shall end up with a seventh…
*Walking, standing, sitting on haunches, sitting fully lowered, running, sleeping.
Wham!
Once again I’m indebted to Sunday for this. When she was annoyed or agitated she shouldn’t thrash her tail around in the manner that Smudge is demonstrating here. Instead all she’d do was raise her tail once and let it hit the ground again with a resounding THWACK!
As this series of strips progresses, Jones’ bandage will gradually morph into a plaster cast…
Gn Gn Gn Gn
My first cat, a beautiful tortoiseshell-and-white girl called Sunday, was injured when she was a kitten. We don’t know what happened, whether she was involved in a car accident or kicked by a drunk from the pub down the road, but I remember coming home from school one day, and having Sunday run up the hill to greet me as normal. But something was wrong with her back legs – she couldn’t keep upright and kept flopping over as she ran.
We took her to the vets and discovered that something awful had happened to her hind quarters. She was no longer able to pee unaided, and her tail was paralysed. She should have been put to sleep that evening, but the vet thought she appeared to be unconcerned about it, and she was such a lovely cat that she was given a second chance. She was given painkillers and we were taught how to squeeze her bladder to make her pee mechanically.
After a few days, a miracle happened. She learned to pee by herself again, and she could walk and run without falling over. After a month you wouldn’t know that anything was wrong with her apart from her tail which remained paralysed apart from the muscles at the base of the tail, which meant she could raise it to half mast in greeting. Also, she couldn’t feel a thing that happened to it.
Fast forward 14 years. Sunday’s an old lady now (and she would live a good few years longer yet) but she’s still as lively as she was when she was younger. We’ve moved out to a house in High Brooms, and she’s having great fun patrolling the fish pond and the gardens around us. One evening she came in through the French windows, chirruped a greeting and jumped up onto the back of the sofa for a pet and a nuzzle. As I stroked her I realised her tail was wet. No, not wet… covered in blood. And Sunday is completely unconcerned and purring her head off.
She ended up with the kind of heavy bandage that Jones is currently sporting. Sadly, her tail went septic and half of it had to be amputated, but once again she made a full recovery, and was just as happy with half a useless tail as she was with an entire one.
Click click click click
Another gag inspired by a photo in the Day by Day cat calendar — this one a backview of some kittens with their tails handing over the edge.
I was fascinated by Newton’s Cradles when I was a kid. I never had one but if you were in a shop in Tunbridge Wells in the 1970s and could hear a ‘Click click click’ sound coming from the gift section, you could pretty well guess that’s where I was.
This is an example of why cheating at artwork doesn’t work. The idea was that the gag would be helped if the cats stayed in exactly the same position in each frame and only the tails moved, so I drew one frame and then photocopied it another seven times. The result is, frankly, lifeless – compare it with ‘Tail Jive’ two weeks ago, where every iteration of Smith was drawn individually and it looks much better.
Inevitably…
Right. That’s that little fad officially over. Next week: Tail Jive Gangnam Style.*
* Not really.