I'd like to thank the academy...

Shucks, guys. This is the humblest day in my life etc.

The winning cartoon is here.

No, seriously, this is a great honour, not least because it was voted for my my peers and the public. And to be fair, I didn't win the award outright, I'm sharing it with Loren Fishman's Humoresque for this cartoon, which gets even cleverer the closer you look at it.

Millie Week 31 - Mon 1 - Sat 6 March 1991

The missing strip here is from Easter Monday, which doubled as April Fools Day. Here's the script or that day.

1. Millie is outside the door to Richard's room, on the landing. She is calling to Richard to come out.
MILLIE:  HEY! RICHARD! GUESS WHO I'VE GOT OUT HERE TO SEE YOU... GEMMA! AND SHE SAYS SHE WANTS TO GO OUT WITH YOU.

2. Millie listens to the reply thru the door.
RICHARD:  IF YOU THINK I'M FALLING FOR A FEEBLE APRIL FOOLS JOKE LIKE THAT YOU'VE GOT ANOTHER THINK COMING!

3. Open up the shot. Millie turns to the girl standing next to her on the landing, hitherto off-frame. It is none other than Gemma herself, trying hard not to laugh.
GEMMA: I LOVE A GOOD DOUBLE BLUFF, DON'T YOU?

Easter then segues into a storyline about dieting and body image. Personally I find fat happy people far more attractive than thin whiny ones.

Holy Fuzz Balls.

Ever since T used this phrase in her sublime 'Snow Sez' strip here I've been searching for an excuse to use it myself. And here it is.

Cheat!

This is the first ever example of me using copy and paste in a Smith cartoon. I feel it's cheating usually, but I wanted the drawings in the first three panels to be identical in order to give the impression of time passing in complete stillness. I've made up for it by colouring each frame individually so it doesn't look mechanical, and slightly offsetting each frame so the grid doesn't look artificially rigid. It's a bit like Depeche Mode using randomisers on their drum machines to make them sound more human.

I have a new set and I'm going to use it...

Having introduced the pond last year as a way to get the dye out of Jones' fur, I'm now making it a new setting, and officially incorporating it into Smith and Jones' garden. Expect to see a lot more of it in the future...

Millie Week 30 - Mon 25 - Sat 30 March 1991

More fun at the expense of social workers who desire to put people into preconceived categories.

Interestingly, I've found a letter I wrote in my book of scripts. It must have been in response to a complaint from a real youth group who didn't like the way I'd depicted them. I don't have the original letter, but here's my reply. You can guess what the complaint was like...

Dear Mary and all at the Glebe Youth and Community Centre*

I'm sorry to hear about your complaints about our depictions of youth clubs in 'Millie'. I can assure you that any jokes that I made at the expense of youth clubs were not made out of malice. After all, I help run a youth drama group myself, I'm not going to shoot myself in the foot am I?

I take your point that most youth clubs are much better run than the one depicted in 'Millie'. Unfortunately, if the club in the strip was run with the same imagination and verve I see in most youth clubs it wouldn't be funny. It's a sad comment on human nature, I suppose, but competence isn't considered to be entertaining. That's why the Rushey Green youth club in the strip is they way it is.

Anyway, your point has been taken. And you may find that Nigel, the youth leader in the strip at the moment, will have his hands full dealing with a female youth leaer with a bit more savvy in the near future...**

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Pilcher

* Names changed to protect the innocent

** This did indeed happen, but not for a year...

Splish splash

First of all, we're past the Spring Equinoxe, so the strip has moved to it's summer plumage. The grass and the sky will remain this colour until the end of September. This was inspired by watching some birds washing in a puddle one lunch break. Not much else to say, apart from noting that in the last panel I tried to catch that moment when a cat gets distracted, forgets to put its tongue back in its mouth, and then walks about with it sticking out for the next few minutes until you laugh at it.

Triangulate

I'm on an ear kick this week. Having treated Scrumpy's ears as a windsock on Monday, I'm now playing with Smith's ears. I love the way cats ears can move independently of one another, and how a seemingly sleeping cat can track two noises simultaneously.

Wind

One of the problems with living on the coast is that when we get wind, we get lots of it. It's the kind of wind that makes my wife feel homesick for the plains of Texas and New Mexico. Except it's wetter here. Back in Clovis NM the wind tends to be more like a hairdryer with the dial set at 11. And some sand added.

Millie Week 29 - Mon 18 - Sat 23 March 1991

If this week's strip is about anything, it was about the complete divorce between what I experienced as a teenager in Tunbridge Wells, and what the media was telling me all teenagers were doing. If the Daily Mail was to be believed, when I wasn't out of my head on drugs or fathering babies with a string of teenage girls I didn't know the name of, I was supposed to be vandalising churches, taking part in black magic rituals and not tidying my bedroom. I can only plead guilty to the last one.

Here we have a well meaning social worker who believes the Guardian's spin on that fanciful narrative - that kids are up to all that stuff but that SOCIETY IS TO BLAME, yeah?

The youth club is partly on based on the Christian youth club I used to go to in 1977, the year in which I tried my best to become a practicing church-going Christian, but realised that while I had the greatest respect for people's individual religious impulses, I couldn't make any sense of an organised one-size-fits-all religion. But that self important philosophising is by the by - as far as the strip is concerned the important thing I got out of it was the memory of endless ping-pong.

Ting!

Today's subject is music. It's good to see Jones at the piano again. Jones's main love is boogie-woogie and ragtime, but this time around, she's playing the overture to 'The Phantom of the Opera', chosen because the heavy chords in the score looks like she's building up to a huge crescendo.

Smith isn't a musician. Hence: percussion, and a tendency to drift off in the middle of a concerto.

Millie will appear tomorrow.

Dangdangdang

Today's subject is New Inventions - and this was the one that caused me the most problems. The ideas for the other strips this week came into my head quite readily, but this one was a slog. I'm still not sure it works.

Chinese Handcuffs

Today's subject was Chinese Handcuffs. Hmm, tough one. This presumes that my characters have fingers. Strictly speaking, they don't.

Despite the stubby digits on their paws they are somehow able to operate computers and play the piano. Don't ask me how - that's just the magic of cartoons. However, having cats be able to manipulate a Chinese finger trap is just beyond credulity. So I used their tails instead, and today's strip was born.

Copernipuss

Today's subject is Science, Physics, Astronomy and this seemed to be the perfect excuse to explain the way a cat views the universe. But then you suspected this already, didn't you?

999

Todays subject is Law Enforcement and Cops.

Dialing 999 is the UK equivalent of dialing 911. The theory was that, in the days of phones with rotary dials, it would be easy to select the right numbers to dial in darkness or a smoke filled room. The theory was quite good, but surelly dialing 000 would have been easier, and dialling 111 nine times faster?

This is my first experiment with animated gifs. I won't be using them often, but they'll crop up now and again when I think they are appropriate and add to the strip.

Crisis on Infinite Sherpas!

Yes, there' s a big event happening this week that will change the Sherpaverse forever. In an attempt to unite the continuities of strips as diverse as Jack Radio, Navy Bean, Cubie 'n' Bouncy and Mr Todd there's going to be some white-hot crossover action this week which will leave the Sherpaverse shattered...

No not really.

Actually, this week's event is much more benign. 30 Sherpa strips (list to be added here as soon as I get it) have been given a set of topics to play with; a new one for each day this week. I'm participating from Monday through Saturday - I thought it would be cheating to have a strip on Sunday's topic: 'Animals'.

Check through the comics on Sherpa this week and see what you discover. There's a lot of wonderful stuff on there. (There's also a fair amount of rubbish, but there's a lot of really wonderful material out there.)

This weeks festivities have been arranged by Bill Wandel of Mixed Medications, Derrick Wood of Rogue Symmetry, Jon Carter of Cartertoons (who also supplied the logo) and 'tame' of Nano-World. Thanks to all of them. Read their strips.

Today's topic is Art and Painting. This dovetails nicely with a series I'm currently writing which is due to coincide with my hometown of Hastings' annual festival of chinstroking modern art, and the opening of the controversial Jerwood Gallery on the seafront. I had a few ideas that I couldn't fit into the main storyline, so I used one of them for today's subject.

Jones is trying to carve a lump of Hastings sandstone - outcrops of this rock appear all over Hastings and the Kent and Sussex Weald, and it's the stuff Hastings Castle is built of. It is not, repeat NOT a potato.

Millie Week 28 - Mon 11 - Sat 16 March 1991

I was quite proud of the denouement of this story, it had a nice circularity to it - Richard breaking his leg because he thinks he's unloved, and not recognising what's right in front of his eyes right at the end.

The fickle finger of fashion

This is very me. You'll always know when a particular trend has ended - it's usually three hours after I give in and join in with it.

Flying the flag for Chumley

This week's series is an adaptation of one I did when I was drawing Smith the first time round as a teenager, and apart from some recasting, and some cutting, it's stood up pretty well. However, todays strip is brand new - just before I started drawing it I decided the gag wasn't good enough and came up with a better idea, one which continued the story.

The original strip (dated Friday August 28 1991) is below. The cat taking Chumley's place is Max, another cat from the neighbourhood I lived in. Max's character was a sort of less extreme version of Scrumpy - he was a vent for my teenage angst. I think I prefer the much more happy-go-lucky Chumley we have now.

The outsider

Chumley finds himself in the unusual position of cyclical outsider in this run of strips. Normally that would be Smith's role, but as the kink fashion specifically concerns Siamese cats he's one of the insiders this time.

U

Does anyone still talk about things being 'U' and 'Non-U' any more? That's my staunchly middle class Tunbridge Wells upbringing coming out, I'm afraid.

Click!

Oh you lucky lucky people. You're going to get twelve cartoons on the blog over the next fortnight. You'll find out why next Monday, but in the meantime, the strips I was planning to run next week have been pushed forward to join this week's.

This is the first of a run of six. The second one you see underneath was going to run on Comics Sherpa, but it didn't seem strong enough. It's essentially all set up and no punchline, and the rest of the story still makes sense without it, so I've cut it from Sherpa and just kept it as an extra for the blog. Say thank you.

This week's story is dedicated to anyone who thought London Fashion Week was ridiculous. (My spies tell me that includes a lot of the people who were involved in it.)

Millie Weeks 27, Mon 4 - Sat 9 March 1991

Nothing much to report here - just more variations on the Sammi-Richard-Gemma triangle and a leg in plaster.

Blee!

No cat likes cold food straight out of the fridge - for a start it just doesn't smell right - but some cats are more fussy than others.

Gizmo, our daft hand-me-down tabby cat had most of his teeth removed at Christmas. Heaven knows what he had been eating before he came to us, but I have a feeling it must have been mainly sugar. Anyhow, he's now mainly toothless, apart from one single lower canine which he uses to affect a sneer now and again, and this means he's on soft cat food. Sometimes Linda forgets to cut up his food for him, and he's left with a solid cylinder of pate to try to work his way around. His answer to this is to seek me out and then mew persistently until I deal with his plate.