It is now a year since I first started writing and drawing the Mitchell cartoons. Apart from wishing Mitchell a very happy first birthday, I thought I’d take a little time to think back on this first year of cartoons.
Today’s cartoon is number 126 and I find myself a little surpried that it’s still going so strongly when, visually, Mitchell has more in common with an egg than the feline elegance of real cats. Like a lot of my comic and cartoon characters, the visual came before I knew what I wanted to do with him, but it didn’t take me long to establish his character in my head, particularly when I saw him as gin-and-tonic drinking, bass playing and lazy as hell.
Mitchell straddles a line between a genuine cat-like attitude and behaviour and the things he does that take him into anthropomorphic territory. Elements of this are evident in a lot of my cat characters (Mr. Smoozles and Scout, for instance), but the fact that we never see the humans, even though they exist in the wings, gives the cartoons a definition that’s nicely fuzzy.
Another aspect to the cartoons is that I’ve approached them as a means to portray Mitchell’s attitude or reactions to things or events around him. Sometime this means that these events have already happened or are “off screen”, which can make the reader/viewer work a little for the joke, but I hope this is part of what makes them fun.
Here’s to plenty more to follow.
Congratulations to Mitchell for his first birthday and to you for the comic.
I like the simple, unforced humour that the character possesses, I think the hinting at things rather than explicitly stating them gives the comic a sense of elegance and allows it to be enjoyed in small doses, as opposed to ongoing stories that often require reading many pages to get the payoff.
Here’s to another year of Mitchell strips!
Hi Ben,
Thanks for the kind words and I’m so glad you like the approach I’m taking.
I’m rather pleased it works differently to the other comic strips I do.