That’s one of our Hastings fishing boats in the final panel. The real boat is pictured to the right. Photo by Tony Bates. Buy a canvas print here.
Tag / Smudge
Swimming
Yes, the butterfly is a Monarch – or as I thought when I found a reference photo on Google Images, a generic red butterfly. It turns out that it’s been blown a good 3,000 miles off course. I should have gone for one of these instead, a Red Admiral.
I was sorely tempted to colour the water in the pool an opaque green colour, to match the diving pool in Rio, but in the end I stuck to the more typical livid turquoise. Look at that pool. Are you supposed to dive in it or play hockey on it?
High Jump
The 2016 Olympics have started in Rio, and once again the cats are holding the backyard Olympics in the garden. It’s useful to have a set subject to write about sometimes. It’s also good to have any other sport than football to write about – I ignored the European Cup completely this year. So, it turned out, did the England team.
Who knew we were going to do so well this year? I was fully expecting us to have the hubris Olympics this time round, turning up expecting to get all the medals after our performance in the London Olympics and then choking on everyone of them. I was very glad to be proved wrong. Of course, half the Russian squad being in rehab helped, but even so…
Dandelions
I remember rehearsing a show with the West Kent Youth Theatre in the open air one summer. It was a beautiful day, so we were using a tiled quadrangle next to West Kent College’s science block, which was downwind of a field of dandelions which had just come into seed. The wind got up and we were suddenly breathing dandelions…
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.
A tribe called quest
The first frame sees the cats on the start of their quest, walking thru Alexandra Park towards the town centre. And the second frame extablishes Smith and Jones’ house to be somewhere in the St Helen’s area of Hastings. I just took this as a chance to portray the cats as they see them selves in their own imaginations. So Jones is, naturally, the Queen, while Smudge is the she-warrior Smudge-Ra. Chumley is more spiritual so I made him the wizard, and poor Smith can’t help but see himself as the fall-guy for the other three.
D&D
I haven’t played Dungeons and Dragons for around thirty years so pardon me if the terms I’m using here are out of date. Panic not; Smith isn’t turning into one of those gamer cartoons where motionless people in hats are snarky to one another – this storyline lasted about three more strips before it mutated into something else.
Prohibition
Also published by the Independent. And by the time it was published on GoComics the powers that be had revised their bylaws after a group of dog owners staged a wag-in on the pier, and dogs were allowed on the pier under suffrance.
Look, it’s a guest apperance by my own cats, Billy and Bella. Ginger’s just a generic.
Incidentally, that seat Bella’s sitting on is rather neat. They’re custom built and are all over the pier…
