About Humphrey

It's 1983 and I'm living in a basement flat in Hackney (Mabley St, to be precise). It's a one bedroom flat but there are usually three or four of us living there. Some of us are students. Others (including me) are unemployed.

Into this flat one day, one of my flatmates brought a pet. It was a tortoise. I never really understood why he decided to buy a tortoise. I suspect drugs were involved.

We called the tortoise Humphrey. Humphrey lived in a cardboard box in the sitting room (which also doubled as my bedroom). He had as much lettuce as he could ever want.

Tortoises don't make great pets. They're not, for example, particularly affectionate. You'll never find a tortoise running down the hallway to greet you when you come home from a hard day signing on. In fact you'll never find a tortoise giving you the slightest sign that he knows you're there.

We started making up stories about Humphrey. We imagined that we knew what he was thinking. I suspect that drugs were involved there too. Eventually I started drawing cartoons with Humphrey in the starring role. I called the strip "Humphrey the Happy Hippy Tortoise". It's a bit of a misnomer. In the cartoons Humphrey was rarely very happy and it was clear that he despised the hippies that he lived with.

These cartoons were all in a little green book. Whilst clearing out my study recently I found this book. I thought that rather than putting it away to be found again in another twenty-five years, I would scan the cartoons and put them on the web. So here they are. It turns out there were more than I remembered. I thought there were four or five of them, but there are about twenty of them. I obviously had rather more time on my hands than I remember.

Surprisingly most of the cartoons have some kind of basis in reality. Some of them come from conversations that we had about Humphrey whilst sitting around smoking and drinking into the small hours. Others are based (loosely, of course) on things that actually happened.

You may detect the influence of Fat Freddy's Cat. I think I was aiming more at Garfield[1], but I was reading far more of the former and it clearly shows.

Humphrey didn't stay with us for more than a few months. One of my flatmates' parents decided (quite rightly, I'm forced to agree) that keeping him in our flat was cruel. They took him to live in their garden in Kent. After a few months there, he got through a hole in the fence and ran away.

[1] Or, perhaps, Opus. I distinctly remember an American friend introducing me to Bloom County whilst I was living in this flat. This was years before the Guardian carried the strip.