Pencil

Actually, I believe that's what they call a propelling pencil.

Sorry. I'll get my coat.

Mike Pike Essipode Seven

Frame 2. Inspired by those TV warnings on Kids programmes: "Remember, Batman can scale tall buildings because he's a superhero, you can't" and so on. Nowadays I put a warning on anything a bit iffy to say "The following content may offend the kind of people who are professionally offended by everything on behalf of other people" which is a lot nearer the truth.

Last Frame: Scooby Doo! Zoiks!

Millie No 7

 

Daily Mirror, May 12th 1990

This introduced Samantha Bihari, the second of the three girls the strip would revolve around.  The third one, Gemma, arrived about a month later, and then I had my main cast assembled until I was asked to introduce Millie and Richard's parents about two years later.

Wogan was the big early evening chat show of its day, hosted by the very wonderful Terry Wogan, DJ, Irishman and Official National Treasure. 

Stomp.

Every now and again, it's good to put an outrageous pun into the strip. And Archy got what he deserved for using it. But don't worry, he's a cockroach - it'll take more than a cat paw to harm him. He returns on Monday. Just as well, he's proving to be surprisingly popular.

Incidentally, font nerds may be interested to know that the typewriter font Archy uses is Prestige Elite Bold. Not only that - I'm so old school that I insist on printing the words out and sticking it onto the original artwork before scanning the black and white artwork in rather than doing it in Photoshop during post-production. Ironically, it takes up more space but is harder to read than my own handwriting.

Cockroachness

As Ken Dodd almost sang:

Cockroachness, cockroachness,
The greatest gift that I possess
I thank the Lord that I've been blessed
With more than my share of cockroachness.

Play the link, you'll be humming it for ages. Sorry.

enter the cockroach

This is why I introduced the typewriter a few weeks ago.

Yes, his name is archy (with a lower case a). I must reread the Archy and Mehitabel poems at some point - I remember coming across them in Tunbridge Wells Children’s library when I was about eight or nine and devouring every book I could find. I remember the characters, but the poems themselves I’ve forgotten. I must find them again, especially with the George Herriman illustrations...

I’m told Don Marquis did a sequel, Jughead and Mehitabel, but that never sold.

It has been pointed out to me that a certain orange cat has also had dealings with a cockroach called Archy. That may be so, but not to my knowledge - I've deliberately kept away from Garfield just to make sure I don't accidentally lift any of Jim Davis' ideas. Besides, this is actually a redraw of a cartoon I first produced at school in 1981. The original is reproduced below. I couldn't draw straight lines then, either.

Mike Pike Essipode 6

The essipode in which Mike Pike never appears. But it does mark the first appearance of the strip’s evil genius, Alfonzo F Thurgermeyer,  The Coffee Machine That Walks Like a Man. His secret origin will be dealt with in a future strip.

SQRRRRRPPHHHPHPHPHLLLLL was my attempt to put down in words the sound of one of those Italian expresso (as we called it then) coffee machines that used to be in cafes in the days before Starbucks. They produced coffee by loudly abusing steam, milk, water and coffee beans in a machine that looked like a chrome plated chemistry set. It was a noise that always set my teeth on edge.

The now accepted usage of Muhahahahahahar! for an evil laugh had not been coined yet, hence a rather weedy hahahahahahahaha!

Why Peru? No idea. It just went with the Inca I suppose. Titicaca Towers does have a ring to it though, a variation on the British theme park Alton Towers.

Millie No 6.

Daily Mirror, May 5th 1990

Introducing Crippen Comprehensive. My version of a typical inner city 'bog standard' comprehensive school. Interestingly everyone is wearing the uniform of my own old school, the Skinners' School in Tunbridge Wells. Don't believe me? Take a look at this link. Compare and contrast, and marvel that apart from the addition of lots of doubtless very profitable sportswear the uniform hasn't changed one bit in 30 years! It was that kind of place, a sort of home counties Hogwarts.

Note that Millie is carrying the ultimate in chic school luggage - the Tesco carrier bag.

The graffiti in panel 3 must be the politest ever seen in an inner city. I'm not sure that Kylie Minogue was ever very big amongst the graffiti crews of South East London.

I had a tradition of naming the schools in this strip after murderers for some reason.

While we're on the subject of names, we learn Millie and Richard's surname for the first time in panel 4. Millie got her name from the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie. The original title of the strip was Secondary Modern Millie, a Secondary Modern being an archaic kind of school for children considered not bright enough for a Grammar School education. Richard was called Richard because he was sort of a Dick. The surname, Neville, came from the cricket ground in Tunbridge Wells. Little did I know there was a real Richard Neville - one of the leading lights of the underground scene in London in the 60s, and one of the defendants in the Oz trial. I must have passed under his radar. Phew.

“Hey. Wow. Great balls of yeeaaaahhhh”

Catnip. ‘e’ for cats. Apparently.

I’ve noticed that Smudge, now she’s getting older, is no longer as interested in catnip as she used to be. She’ll stick her head in the tub of dried catnip, give it a sniff, think, ‘that was nice’ and then go off to sleep on her bean bag. Gizmo, on the other hand, is still young enough to be a total niphead. He can hear the box of catnip toys being opened from a hundred yards away. And then he’ll spend the next two hours dancing to deep-garage-trance-crunk-hardcore-portico-grimestep-house music until he runs out of energy and has an attack of the munchies.

I’m not one for drugs myself. Never taken them, never been tempted. I don’t like needles, I don’t smoke and I’ve never been able to swallow pills. Even if I was tempted I’d be crap at it.

Besides, having always been the boring one who never took drugs at parties, I can reliably report that if you think I’m boring, try being on the receiving end of the tedious piffle people come up with when they’re off their little nut on dippy substances.

“And finally...”

Those are usually the words that introduce the last item in the news broadcast - the skateboarding duck or ‘panda that can’t get a stiffy’ section. And I daresay those news items, designed to reassure you that after a half hour of war, insurrection, terrorism and incompetence that the world is fundamentally OK, inspired the skateboard sequence last year, and this reprise this year.

That and the fact that despite being a fat waddly 40 something I love skating.

Not skateboards. They only really appeared in the late 70s in Britain and I was a bit too old for them; they were the kind of thing irritating younger brothers would go for. Instead, I always fancied the idea of rollerskating and never did anything about it, until about five years ago.

I know - most people have a mid-life crisis by buying a sports car or a Harley. I got rollerblades instead.

They’re not as scary as you’d think, especially if you start off by taking lessons. I learned during the weekends with Citiskate at a sports centre in central London, and then moved on to evening lessons on tarmac in the deserted and painfully trendy Spitalfields market. And now, when the weather is OK, and I’m not rehearsing a show (broken limbs ruin your dancing ability I find) I love to go skating along the seafront in Bexhill or Eastbourne. Not Hastings - the surface there is dreadful.

If ever you’re on the prom at a seaside town in Sussex and there’s someone who looks like a cross between the Michelin Man and an urban warrior careering towards you, get out of the way. I’m not completely in control.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible

My internet's been down since Tuesday, so I'm doing this entry swiftly at work. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible - TalkTalk (previously Opal, previously Tiscali, previously Carphone Warehouse, previously Pipex) say they'll be looking into it on Saturday evening.

In the meantime the cartoon is still updating automatically at www.gocomics.com/smith, I have strips loaded up to last till the end of March. I'm hoping to be online at home before that, of course...

Ahem!

Have you quite finished with that Blog yet? I demand some attention and I'm going to sit in front of your screen until I get it.

Just be thankful I'm on your old folder of Millie scripts and not sitting on your keyboard.

Incidentally, have you seen what Gizmo's up to in the front room? I've seen this happen before with neutered toms - one snip and they turn into John Barrowman....

I am what I am
I am my own special creation...

...oops.

Snogfest

Dogs do come across as a bit needy, don't they? And not exactly discriminating. At least with a cat you know you've earned their love - and you'll keep getting it providing you keep paying.

While we're at it, here's a Valentine's cartoon from Riverfields...

A happy Valentines Day to you all.

Mike Pike Essipode 5

Not much to say about this one - it's two parts exposition to one part plot.

What IS the thing that goes 'SQRRRPHLLLGGHHRRRPHLLL'? Find out next Sunday....

Millie No 5

Oh dear. This is an example of what happens when editors get hold of a script and it all goes wrong. This was squidged together from two scripts I originally wrote and to my (possibly hypercritical) mind it just doesn't ring true. Richard speech in panel three comes out all garbled, the compression of two weeks of story into five panels destroys all sense of Richard's anguish at being in an urban wasteland, while Millie's speech balloon in panel five is just embarrassing. I can understand the need to shoehorn her in, this early into the strip's run, but using the word 'Div'??? Honestly!

In retrospect I should have requested a redraw, but I wasn't confident enough to do that then.

Thankfully this was an isolated example. My material still got rewritten occasionally but the editors normally improved on what I had written, tightening it up and making it clearer.

Here are the original scripts:

W E E K   S I X

1. Two removal men, one the same as in the previous week's cartoon, the other in an Iron Maiden T shirt, ripped jeans and no fixed haircut, younger than the first, attempt to get a bulky sofa (MFI, late 70s) in through the front door of the new house. First they try it lengthways, but it won't go in.
SFX: DONK

2. Then they try sideways...
SFX: DONK

3. Then they try turning it upright, but one of the arms won't get past the lintel.
SFX: DONK

4. Millie and Richard stare aghast at the remnants of the front doorway now the sofa has gone through. There are missing brick either side of the door frame (which has had to be totally destroyed) in the vague shape of a sofa. The open door hangs in two halves from whatever hinges are left.
MILLIE: TRUST US TO HAVE A SIZE NINE HOUSE AND A SIZE TEN SOFA!

5. They walk indoors, past the remains of the door, and pick their way thru the chaos of boxes and furniture that hasn't found a home yet.
RICHARD: THIS HOUSE IS A DISASTER! I'M GOING TO CHECK OUT...

6. Richard has just walked out into the garden, and is shocked by what he sees. It's all been concreted over. We see a tatty tarmac backyard and the back of the house, an open back door, the kitchen window, a maze of plumbing, a coal bunker... and no plant life at all.
RICHARD: ...THE GARDEN.

7. Richard walks into the house again with a single weed in a pot. He has a dazed expression on his face. Millie is trying to unpack some records, but looks over her shoulder at him.
RICHARD: THIS WEED LOOKED RATHER LONELY OUT THERE SO I THOUGHT I'D BRING IT IN WITH US.

W E E K   S E V E N

1. This strip is effectively a monologue by Richard, who is having one of his turns. Exterior. Urban. Wide staring eyes and hand on forehead.
RICHARD: ALL THIS BRICK AND STONE!!

2. Richard pushes with both arms against the sides of the frame as if they were closing in on him.
RICHARD: THE CITY IS HEMMING ME IN ON ALL SIDES...

3. Richard is running for his life.
RICHARD: I MUST ESCAPE!

4. Richard looks up at an advertising poster with a lush sylvan scene on it. It would look like he really was in the countryside - only the countryside doesn't peel and consist of weatherboard below knee level.
RICHARD: THE COUNTRYSIDE IS CALLING!!

5. Long shot of roundabout in the middle of a busy traffic intersection. Richard is seen sitting self-consciously on the scrubby island in the middle while the traffic circulates around him.
RICHARD: WELL, LET'S FACE IT, RICHARD, THIS IS AS CLOSE AS YOU'RE GOING TO GET...

Over the hedge

It's been a hectic week this week - I've had no time to myself at all. It's all down to having one show ready for performance tonight and starting rehearsals on another one, so I've been trapped in draughty church halls every evening this week.

This cartoon came from watching Cholmondeley, Smudges big brother, negotiate his way along a dividing wall between gardens. He could manage the wall, he could manage the fence, but when he tried running along the top of the box hedge, it all went wrong for him.

This is one of my continuous background strips. It's a technique I've borrowed from one of my favourite strips when I was a kid, Maurice Dodd and Dennis Collins' 'The Perishers'. It's OK, Maurice says he got the idea from a 1930s strip called 'Pop' by Millar Watt, so it's not like he has an exclusive on the technique. It works the same way as animation, with a single background broken up into frames and the characters moving from frame to frame.

A previous example of mine from last summer's trip to Hastings' fishing beach.

...and a couple of examples from the masters, Collins and Dodd.

Another post

More post-impressions, this time of iconic Po-Modern architecture, including the AT&T building, the Citicorp tower and a Greek column (no self respecting building from the 1980s could be seen without one).

Who do you do?

There used to be three impressions that every Brit could do - Tommy Cooper, Frank Spencer and Michael Caine. If you were a light entertainer and wanted to drop an impression into your routine these were the default settings. All of these characters date from the 1970s - anyone attempting them now is either being ironic or so out of touch that they think there are still only three TV channels.

Tommy Cooper was a comic genius, a shambling giant of a man who combined seemingly inept magical routines with corny one liners, and made it work. His catchphrase was 'Just like that', accompanied by a shimmying movement of the hands and his unmistakable 'aharharharhar' laugh. And he wore a fez, - fezzes were cool long before The Doctor adopted one.

For an sample of his material visit http://www.guy-sports.com/humor/comedians/comedian_tommy_cooper.htm

Spoon Jar Jar Spoon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc3u9bVV6s4

Frank Spencer was a character played by Michael Crawford in a BBC sircom called 'Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em'. He played an ineffectual accident prone mothers' boy who had somehow married Betty, played by Michelle Dotrice. Everything he touched would turn out to be a spectacular disaster. And we are talking spectacular here - Frank's accidents would often involve some terrifying stunt work, which Crawford would do himself. I remember being spellbound by the episode where Frank ends up hanging from the bumper of a Morris Minor which is threatening to tip over the edge of Beachy Head, the highest cliff on the South Coast. It's a pity that when you look at them today, the stunts remain impressive, but the rest of the scripts are sooooo dated. The stock phrase of Frank's simpering "Oooh. Betty! the cat's done a whoospie on my beret' gives you an idea of the level of humour involved.

For the start of the Beachy Head sequence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LuuqDlCKXs

Michael Caine, everyone knows. But his two catchphrases were actually donated to him by an impressionist, Mike Yarwood. One was the rather obvious 'My name is Michael Caine', a phrase which became so famous that the band Madness wrote a song around it, and got the real Michael Caine to voice it on the record. The other was based on a Parkinson interview where Caine was forever coming up with odd facts, but never actually used the phrase 'now, not a lot of people know that'.

Here's a much later Parkinson interview, with Michael Caine impersonating himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0F3kY3uxU

The fourth frame is of course Groucho Marx. You know who he is.

Mike Pike Essipode 4

Fairly straightforward this week - there's only one period joke to explain.

This was the mid 80s and there was a circulation war going on between the tabloids, and it was being fought with bingo cards. The cards with your numbers on were free, but the only way to find out what numbers had been called was to buy the paper every day. The idea of gambling via newsprint slowly permeated up to the quality press, by 1985 it was even happening in the Times, though that was called 'Portfolio' and was based on the movements in the stock exchange.

Newspaper bingo games eventually got killed off by the a combination of the internet becoming popular, and the launch of the National Lottery.

As ever, I like to root my cartoons in geographical reality, and this weeks strip takes place at two different addresses in Princes Street, Tunbridge Wells.

Millie No. 4

Our first view of 36, Grouting Terrace, Catford SE6. Don't look for it on Google Earth, it's not there. But click on the location tag at the bottom of the post and you'll get an idea of its imagined vicinity.

"That's not writing - that's just typing"*

I do think I write in a completely different way to the way I did before computers became commonplace. I was a latecomer to computing, not really seeing the point of them until the first Apple Mac SE's arrived in the UK, the black and white ones with screens the size of letterboxes. Before then I did everything in longhand in that meticulously angular italic writing that seems to be issued to graphic designers at birth. Sentences and paragraphs came out fully formed with the words and the thoughts in the right order, because if you had any amendments to make the only option was to start afresh and write it all out again.

Now I find myself writing words at random and then them order the right shuffling into. It's all a bit lazy really.

Rest assured, Smith the cartoon strip itself remains lovingly hand crafted from the moment the first notes go into my note book up to the moment the finished black and white art is scanned for colouring.


*Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac (or possibly Jack Kerouac on Truman Capote - the Google results for this quote are a bit ambiguous.

Kitten on the keys

This is for anyone who has tried to work in the same room as a cat. Gizmo likes to sit on my paper and play catch the pencil when I'm trying to draw. Whereas Smudge...

Of course, she's not a big fan of the latest iMacs - what's the point of a screen so thin you can't even balance on it, let alone sprawl? Her preferred trick now is to walk all obvhjwccmVJ,CVver the keyboard when I'm not looking. When she was a kitten she even managed to crash the computer network at the vets by jumping onto the computer terminal.