Plump plump

I see Billy and Bella do this a lot.

Plump green verdantness

My commentary when I put this up on Tapas was the fairly cryptic:

ECCLES: (sings) “I talk to the trees. That’s why they put me away…”

I was so pleased to discover that despite the site skewing to a much more youthful demographic than GoComics, and also a much more international one rather than just THE UK and US, people still knew who the Goons were.

Here’s a sample.

Leaves

 

Grass

The first grass cutting of the year always smells a bit special – especially when you’re at school and the smell of cut grass wafts into the room during a boring trigonometry lesson.

IKEA catalogue

I had this idea that to cats the IKEA catalogue must like the Argos catalogue is for humans – ‘the laminated book of dreams’.

Swipe left

Or is it right? I honestly don’t know. All I know is it’s the direction Smudge had to swipe in so the iPad could be seen to be swiped forwards in time.

One of the things I miss about working in a vertical format rather than a horizontal one is that a lot of the sense of space and time between frames is lost.

Twitterstorm

Smith and Jones’ home keeps changing. Sometimes it’s a Victorian terrace, but most of the time it’s a 1960s semi. This is the first time we’ve seen the front of it properly. And it’s sticking as a 1960s semi from now on. Unless the gag requires otherwise. Their house is made of elastic really.

Bunting

Believe it or not, this is the third Royal Wedding that Smith has seen. The first time around it was Charles and Diana’s in 1981, when I was doing the strip for myself while I was still at school. Those jokes got recycled for their son’s wedding to Kate Middleton thirty years later. And now the heir’s got married, it’s the spare’s turn. And I’m going to have to come up with some new jokes this time round.

We’re back!

Just to repeat, we’re back on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. And I’ll be answering questions from Tapas readers on Sundays…

Crayon Zone

This is the last of the Sunday strips, and to celebrate I thought I’d get out my Crayolas and go mad. The question was, is wax crayon a suitable medium for drawing a comic strip in. The answer is obviously ‘not really’.

Smith is returning to its three times a week schedule starting tomorrow. It’ll be updating on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, like it used to in the days when GoComics’ Comics Sherpa was a credible service. My primary conduit is now Tapas.io, the Korean/Californian comics community. Smith has been running repeats on Tapas ever since Comics Sherpa committed commercial suicide, but now it’s caught up with itself, and has gathered a resonable audience.

On Sundays I’ll be indulging in the Tapas tradition of doing a Q&A – those bonus features will be appearing on this site as well, but Comics Sherpa will just be running the vanilla strip until it finally gets around to its promised (but unlikely to ever happen) relaunch.

See you tomorrow…