Mole in one

Looking at it now - the punchline really should be 'Mole in One'. I'll change it when the book comes out.

I am a mole and I live in a hole

If you don't know the song, here's the original...

Ping

It was inevitable that the 'mountain out of a molehill' line was going to be used as some point. The question was how to ring the changes on a really obvious joke. The answer was to make it the set-up rather than the punchline.

The naming of moles

Of course the mole is called Adrian. What else could he be called?

180°

A bit of a variation on the usual 'pull back and reveal' technique of producing punchlines. Instead this shows Smudge's wall on both sides. Alert readers may have realised we're looking at the other side of Smudge's wall in the first two frames when Smudge runs on from the left instead of her usual right.

Dig dig dig

These molehills are structurally quite impressive as well. I reckon the mole must be using some sort of rebar as reinforcement.

Mounds

The problem with having a mole in the strip is that he's going to do what moles do. And here he goes. I've never seen mole hills this large - the only ones I've seen tend to be on Tunbridge Wells Common, and that has a very sandy soil so the hills tend to be low and flat. These are more like termite mounds.

Yeeeeeek!

...It's better than being moled by a goose.

Meet the mole. He's another occasional character who will join the cast of poetic cockroaches, cheeky daffodils and other visitors to the garden.

If he has an inspiration, it's this guy, a Czechoslovakian mole called Krtek (or 'The Mole' in Britain). His adventures used to appear on the BBC when I was a kid, and I'm amazed to find they're still being produced today, and they look exactly the same. Apologies to fans of grey gloomy eastern european cold war animation - you'll find nothing of that sort in The Mole, his main influence appears to be early Disney shorts.