If you’re not from the UK, you might be wondering what monkeys have to do with pianos and cups of tea…

Mark – one half of the creative team behind ‘The Greys’ and ‘Monsters, Inked’ comics – is writing a series of Inkscape tutorials for Full Circle Magazine. The first is a sort of prequel to the main series, introducing the SVG file format, and can be found in issue #60.

Full Circle Magazine is available to download free of charge. It’s primarily a Ubuntu Linux magazine, but the Inkscape tutorials are largely applicable to Windows and MacOS users, too.

These tutorials will start with the very basics of Inkscape, and over time will expand to cover some of the more complex and powerful features of the software we use to create our comics. Many of the tricks and tips we’ve picked up over the past three years will feature throughout the series.

So if you fancy creating your own comic strip, or just want some behind-the-scenes insight into how we do it, start by downloading issue #60 now and follow along with future editions.

This gag was written for use in our local newspaper, and the punchline originally referred to “the BBC” rather than “the TV weather forecast”. Unfortunately the newspaper decided to drop the comic before this strip was printed so we went with the more general term, as it’s now primarily a webcomic rather than a strip for a UK paper.

For the benefit of readers from outside the UK, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is the real name of a real TV chef. Although he hasn’t actually written a book called “Cooking With Roadkill”, it’s exactly the sort of thing he would do. Here’s a quote from a Guardian article about him, via his wikipedia page:

…it got him a commission to make his first Channel 4 series, A Cook on the Wild Side, in which he drove around Britain picking up roadkill and eating the hedgerows, which earned him his nickname of Hugh Fearlessly-Eatsitall

This strip was supposed to have been our final appearence in The Bucks Herald last week (21^st March 2012), but due to space constraints they decided not to print it, leaving #020 as the last strip to appear in the paper.

So this strip continues where the newspaper strips left off. We hope you’ll continue to follow our comics as the plot develops over time (yes, there is an ongoing plot to all of this) – the best way to make sure you don’t miss any is to join us on Facebook or Twitter where we post an announcement for each new strip to go online.

(For anyone who doesn’t get the joke – and bear in mind that it was written for our local newspaper – the soil round here is very chalky which makes it alkali. Hydrangeas grow pink in alkali soil, but blue in acidic soil)

This strip first appeared in The Bucks Herald on 14^th March, 2012.

The Bucks Herald’s new editor has decided to drop the comic from the newspaper. Although we were informed that the last strip would be appearing in today’s paper (March 21st), it seems that they’ve denied us even that last chance to tell our readers that we will be continuing the strip on our website. Please see this page for more details.

This strip first appeared in The Bucks Herald on 7^th March, 2012.