I know most of you are aware of my penchant for telling other people what to do, or how (after they've done it) it could have been done better. No thanks necessary.
I was reading through the re-visited article byJohn Peel on this site which introduced the Beau Peep characters, and there was one which I felt deserved his own strip. That character is Sopwith the camel.
There are some "experts" who pooh-pooh the idea of animal strips, as they feel animals don't work as conduits for humour*cough*Garfield*cough* but I disagree.
Yes, Sopwith is too big to inhabit a living room, at least a European style living room, but these things are easily negotiated. His world is the desert, the endless sea, the enigmatic vista of easy to draw sand. Look at BC, an incredibly successful strip which is set mainly in the Paleolithic period where, as everyone knows, Christian neanderthals co-existed with dinosaurs, and which contains very little in the way of interiors. Indeed, the only "prop" is a rock, often with writing on it.
Of all the Beau Peep characters, there is no laconic, wisecracking Fonz-type figure, and Sopwith could be him.
Sopwith's secret agenda is that he believes camels to be vastly more intelligent than humans, yet continue being used as man's beast of burden, and he is constantly plotting a coup, a night raid during which all camels will rise up and slaughter the humans, taking over businesses and city infrastructures.
This highlights Sopwith's (indeed all camels) biggest failing. They don't know the actual size of the world. Theirs finishes at the next wadi.
There is a danger that a Sopwith strip could be seen by critics as a metaphor for the Arab struggle against their exploitation by the west, but so what, f*ck 'em.
The critics I mean, not the camels.
