Millie Week 18; Mon 31 Dec 1990 - Wed 2 Jan 1991

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Nowadays, of course, we have phones to do the annoying bleepy thing for us. I don't wear a watch - my iPod Touch fulfils that function - it's a sort of musical fob watch I pull out of my pocket now and again.

I tend not to do new year's resolutions. However, I can say that for the first time in my life, I actually managed to keep to one. The fact that this blog post is here today proves it. Hurrah!

A happy new year to all my readers.

Have a fantastic New Years Eve. I'll be on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic flying back home so I 'll have no idea when the new year will be... it's an eight hour flight so who knows, I may get to ring the new year in eight separate times...

Post Christmas comedown

Was that it????

Boxing Day

Today is the Feast of Stephen so 'Good King Wenceslas' is actually a Boxing Day carol.

It always annoys me that the USA starts to dismantle Christmas and goes back to work as soon as the day itself is over. You've got it all wrong. There are twelve days to Christmas and this is just day two. Christmas isn't over till the twelfth drummer drums. Britain won't go back to work until Wednesday - as Christmas fell over the weekend we reckon it doesn't really count as a holidays and tack another day onto the end.

Why is it called Boxing Day? Allow me to go all Wikipedia on you:

"In the UK, it was a custom for tradesmen to collect "Christmas boxes" of money or presents on the first weekday after Christmas as thanks for good service throughout the year. This is mentioned in Samuel Pepys' diary entry for 19 December 1663; This custom is linked to an older English tradition: in exchange for ensuring that wealthy landowners' Christmases ran smoothly, their servants were allowed to take the 26th off to visit their families. The employers gave each servant a box containing gifts and bonuses (and sometimes leftover food)."

All perfectly true. It still goes on today. Though the killjoys at the Post Office today (I wrote this on December 4th) instructed their postmen not to accept Christmas Boxes of over £30 as 'they could be construed as bribes'. First they take away their pensions, then they take away their bonuses, and now this.

I'm not expecting any post this Christmas.

Millie Week 17; Thu 27 - Sat 29 Dec 1990

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Happy Christmas!!! Oooo. New tablet? Schmancy!

My wife has been knitting the same sweater for me for the last four years! It'll never be finished because it'll never reach the high standards she sets herself, so she keeps on pulling it apart and starting it again.

How on earth did I get the word 'frottage' past the Mirror? They would always call me up on imagined problems - I once referenced the famous dance DJ Joey Negro in a strip and got called up on it until I explained that it was a real name. But somehow, frottage never got spotted.

Millie Week 17; Mon 24 & Wed 26 Dec 1990

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British papers don't publish on Christmas Day, so there are only two cartoons here today.

Ah, dear old Cheesy Wotsit. Whatever happened to her? Well, it turns out she's been doing a lot of British TV in soaps I never watch, like Emmerdale and Holby City. And then she's been a contestant in Strictly Come Dancing. I never watch that either. Sorry, Patsy, you've been very busy but you've disappeared completely below my radar.

Note the Christmas sweater Millie is wearing in the Boxing Day strip.

A Merry Christmas to you all. May you all have a truly magical day...

Christmas viewing

Forget the turkey, if BBC America isn't showing the Doctor Who Christmas special on Christmas night there's going to be an international incident...

•They are, at 9/8c, whatever that means. What is that in mountain time?

The shortest day

Britain is further north than you would expect - we're roughly at the same latitude as Labrador in Canada. So today here on the south coast the sun rises at around eight in the morning, and sets again at a quarter to four. The rest of the country sees even less daylight...

Merry Xmas Everybody

The perennial stompalong party hit by Slade, as much a part of a British Christmas as plum duff and Charles Dickens. If you don't know the song, and Noddy Holder's famous holler over the fade out, here it is, from and old Top of the Pops. Jones is doing the bit at 3.30. And, yes, they are miming to the record.

In the clip the odd looking man in the Santa suit is Jimmy Saville, DJ and national treasure, who died a month ago.

Millie Week 15; Thu 20 - Sat 22 Dec 1990

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I never got that scalextric set.

If you don't know the carol, here it is...

Millie Week 16; Mon 17 - Wed 19 Dec 1990

I collect daft aftershave names. All of the ones the girls find in the strip are genuine, apart from Butch, which I borrowed from one of The Goodies fake adverts (though researching it now, it turned out to be for tobacco rather than aftershave).

If you do click on the link, remember this is from 1972. Standards have changed for the better since then. Incidentally, it's a clip from the intermission for their 'Kitten Kong' show.

In the Bleak Midwinter

Christina Rosetti's haunting Christmas carol is much loved. But I've always thought that she lost her way in the 'snow on snow' bit. OK, we get it, it's snowed a lot.

If you don't know 'In the Bleak Midwinter' - here it is...

Hi, 'T'.

Cosy fire

I've noticed Smudge and Gizmo warming themselves in front of an unlit fire several times before, fighting for the best spot. They just associate that part of the room with warmth. The fact that the central heating may be in and the warmth is coming from a radiator in another part of the room doesn't matter, it seems.

This year's Christmas tree strip

Partially inspired by the weeping angels in Doctor Who... all the action takes place in the dark.

Millie Week 15; Thu 13 - Sat 15 Dec 1990

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Millie Week 15; Mon 10 - Wed 12 Dec 1990

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Look, the promotion in The Mirror's over and the strip's its normal height again.

Multiplexes were something new in Britain at the time, along with the concessions stand. Before the multiplex, you were lucky to get a bag of Rowntree's Fruit Pastilles and a carton of Kia Ora (a sickly still orange drink) at the snack bar of the cinema. Now we were presented with industrial quantities of popcorn and cardboard vats of fizzy drinks. I now smuggle my own Fruit Pastilles into the cinema...

It's a Cannon cinema! That takes me back. Cannon was an Israeli owned chain, the main conduit for Golan/Globus's movies that no-one else would touch. Nowadays we have the straight-to-DVD movie - back then in Tunbridge Wells we had whatever was Cannon screen 3, in a converted bar where the screen was wider than the depth of the seating.

As you can see in Wednesday's strip, Teenage Mutant Hero/Ninja Turtle fever was at its height at the time...

The secret life of Scrumpy Jack

I won't tell if you don't...

Health and Safety

A necessary evil. I'm all for safety at work, and I applaud the safety advances in places like the construction industry, but the H&S industry tends to expand into places where it's not needed. For me the limit was reached when I was working as a graphic designer at a printing company, and I had to waste a day on a course on 'how to pick up heavy objects'. At the end of the day I was given a card, which told me I was certified to pick up heavy objects for two years and gave an expiry date!  I can now use that card to get out of any heavy lifting as I haven't topped up my lugging things about knowledge.

If you have to go on a course just remember, it can be boiled down to these three things:

1) Bend your knees when picking things up off the floor.
2) Secure your ladder before going up it.
3) Cones can be a trip hazard.

Where's the snow?

It doesn't normally snow here in England in December. In fact it doesn't normally snow here at all. Until two years ago we've had a series of warm wet winters, with snow tending to appear for five minutes in February, and then disappearing again.

The last two winters have been terrible - with depths of snow up to an unprecedented COUPLE OF INCHES! Snowmageddon! The country closed down for a month, and Hastings was cut off from civilisation.

The weather is back normal this year - in fact I haven't had to switch the heating on at all yet this winter. So much for trying to anticipate the weather when I drew this...

Incidentally, the next month's worth of blog posts will have actually been written and posted in early December. We're off to New Mexico to visit Linda's parents this Christmas. So I've drawn two month's worth of strips and will be preparing a month's worth of blog posts before I go. If I can find WiFi in Clovis (there used to be a church on Prince St with really good WiFi) I'll post supplementary comments on GoComics and the Blog while I'm there...

Millie Week 14; Thu 6 - Sat 8 Dec 1990

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The Little Mermaid is a great film, of course - widely recognised to be the first movie in Disney's 1990s return to form after the two decades in the doldrums ushered in the The Aristocats. (Look at the Aristocats nowadays and it looks half finished, and it's suspiciously similar to Chuck Jones' 'Gay Purree' movie from eight years earlier.) Of course, parents of budding Disney princesses who have had to watch the DVD of the film on an endless loop for the past three years may have other opinions.

If you don't know what Clearasil is you've never been a teenager. It's an acne treatment, and girls can smell it at 100 paces.

Gemma's house - in a posher part of Catford. Note the middle class signifiers, the carriage lamp outside the door, the Tudorbethan architecture of the houses in the background, the string of pearls around Gemma's mum's neck.

Millie Week 14; Mon 3 - Wed 5 Dec 1990

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Note the new shallower format. This was for one week only - I think the Mirror had some sort of Christmas promotion going in the space below the cartoons and we had to shove up a bit to make room on the page.

..and this is the story I set up last week - Gemma's reluctant date with Richard.

GoComics is undergoing maintenance

Please have patience with GoComics today - they've been doing some behind the scenes fiddling in order to improve the performance of the site, which has been pretty slow lately. They're still putting all the pieces back together, so todays strip hasn't loaded yet.

However, the old Sherpa site at http://www.comicssherpa.com/site/feature?uc_comic=csmdx is working OK. And you can still see today's strip in the post below.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Advent calendars

Can you still get old fashioned advent calendars any more? The paper ones, I mean, with a different picture behind each door leading up to a big double door on Christmas Eve with a nativity scene behind it. Nowadays the only calendars I can find have uniformly grotty lumps of a brown substance which is not quite but almost completely unlike chocolate* squatting behind their doors. However, whichever kind you have, the doors are impossible to open without doing some severe damage to the rest of the calendar...
*© Douglas Adams 1978

Balcony

I'm essentially drawing the balcony to my flat here. Smudge adores the balcony - she loves going out there and getting some sun in her fur. Gizmo, on the other hand, likes to poke his head through the railings and miaow plaintively at anything four legged that walks past. No-one ever pays any attention to him. Bless.

Dirty ears

How do lop eared rabbits survive in the wild? Those ears must get in the way so much. This brings a whole to meaning to that query of mothers the world over: 'have you washed behind your ears?'

Millie Week 13 Pt 2: Thu 29 Nov - Sat 1 Dec 1990

Just like real Amateur Dramatics, Millie and company have been rehearsing their show for the past ten weeks or so, and then it's all over in three panels.

However, the storyline for the next two weeks is set up on Friday...

Millie Week 13 Pt 1: Mon 26 - Wed 28 Nov

Story's nearly over. Just one more day to go and we'll be onto a new story... or will it just be something that continues from this one. I must admit I was quite getting into the more soapy aspects of the strip, as stories and relationships grew organically from what came before.

The second strip illustrates a perennial problem of backstage life - bladder synchronisation. This becomes especially important if you have a quick changes between scenes and have to cope with it by wearing three sets of clothes in the first scene, gradually shedding layers as the act progresses. You do not want to have a sudden need to pee when you're dressed in three sets of trousers...

Thirty days to go...

Strange to think there was once such a concept as Shopping Days Before Christmas. Now shops are open seven days a week, and Tescos are open 24 hours a day that doesn't mean anything any more. However, like cars and new roads, shopping expands to fill the amount of time available to it, and you'll still find a queue at Tescos at 3am in the morning the week before Christmas. That's probably because the shops all shut on Christmas day, and that tends to induce panic buying in Brits for some reason - like they think rationing is about to be reimposed or something...

Stairs

When I was a kid I had stairs but no slinky. Now I am an adult I have a slinky but no stairs. One day they will coincide. One day...

Mmmhmmmmmm

I wish seagulls did just hum. They make wonderfully evocative noise when you're just a visitor to the seaside - a noise that conjures up memories of sun sand and sea. But when they choose to roost on the roof of your house during the summer, and they tend to join in with the dawn chorus in a most raucous manner, that's another matter.

PS. Happy Birthday to me. I am now officially old enough to know better.

Millie Week 12: Thu 22 - Sat 24 Nov 1990

That first night is slowly but inexorably getting closer and closer... and nothing will stop it

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Millie Week 12; Mon 19- Wed 21 Nov 1990

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The Monday strip is surprisingly prophetic. Back in 1990 we all knew about cold calling, but the automated junk phone call was unknown. About three months ago I was plagued by them. No I haven't been involved in an accident that wasn't my fault. No I don't want to claim compensation for credit card insurance I never took out. And don't put me on f***ing hold as soon as I pick up the receiver!
If you're plagued by junk calls, may I recommend the telephone preference service - the UK's official opt out list. I joined it for free a couple of months ago and the unwanted phone calls now have dried up completely.

http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/index.html

The other two strips are more examples of direct experience. In the Tuesday one, I am that foot crushing dancer - Richard c'est moi. My apologies to anyone who has had to be my dance partner.

The second is based on the stage at the Royal Victoria Hall, Southborough, a theatre I spent a lot of my youth performing at. Stages are supposed to have a bit of a rake on them so everyone in the stalls can see what's going on - but the Royal Vic is like the north face of the Eiger. Any scenery put on that stage has to be securely wedged and blocked into position or it will start traveling slowly towards the orchestra pit. Anything on wheels is doomed - which is why no-one's ever dared to do Starlight Express there.

So that explains upstage and downstage. Stage left and stage right are more problematic - I have enough difficulty telling my left from my right anyway, so introducing directions that can change depending on the way you're facing is going to lead to disaster. I prefer the terms Prompt-side and off-prompt, or, nowadays in the White Rock, Hastings-end and Bexhill-end.

Pudsey

First of all - mea culpa! I have used the wrong form of 'its' in the last frame. Normally the apostrophe denotes the use of the possessive, except in the case of 'it's' where it is an abbreviated form of 'it is'. Chumley's also using a remarkably Northern turn of phrase as well. 'That's as maybe'. Well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs, our kid!

As any of my UK readers will tell you, Pudsey Bear is the mascot of the BBC's annual charity telethon Children in Need. Bank managers will be sitting in bathtubs full of baked beans in windy shopping centres all over the country to show how wacky they can be while raising money for a worthy cause.

You can find out more and maybe even donate at http://www.bbc.co.uk/pudsey/. I'll be watching tonight - at least as far as the traditional Doctor Who mini-episode.

Pudsey's injury is unspecified, but whatever it is, it hasn't healed in thirty years...

Too much information

Maybe I pine for the days when there were only three channels on the TV and four on the radio. The sheer ubiquity and abundance of the media today is somehow numbing - it's hard to find the time to fit it all in while simultaneously living your own life.

iPad

I don't have an iPad yet. In fact, just to be contrary, if I do get a tablet I may get an android one instead. Apple is starting to get a monolithic stranglehold on the distribution of new media and I think buying a competitor may be a small contribution to keeping the ecosystem of e-commerce healthily diverse.

Of course, if I ever get to replace my ageing iMac, I'll be sticking to Apple there. Their stuff just works. Trying to get a Windows machineto do something simple after being used to Apple's OS is like trying to coax a slightly backwards child to do differential calculus

Millie Week 11; Thu 14 - Sat 16 Nov 1990

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Millie Week 11; Mon 12- Wed 14 Nov 1990

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Not much to say about this week's set of cartoons - it's a self contained storyline. However, the hole-in-the- wall tuck shop seen in Wednesday's strip is a direct copy of the one in my old school, Skinners in Tunbridge Wells. I drew a diagram so that Roger could get it perfectly right, intending to use it in a storyline in the new year.

The main thing I remember about that tuck shop was the perfectly round indentations in the brickwork all around it - the results of generations of schoolchildren grinding their coins into the Victorian stonework.

Remembrance

A maroon is set off at 11am in Hastings to signal the start of the two minutes silence. Or it may just be two minutes deafness - it's hard to tell.

We remember the fallen with sorrow and gratitude. We remember, but we never learn.

Bonfire

I've always felt uneasy about the practice of burning the guy. OK, it's the effigy of a man who tried to blow up the Palace of Westminster 400 years ago (or was he just the fall-guy?) but even so, it strikes me as a bit medievel.

Here in Sussex, we take our bonfire celebrations seriously. There are bonfires that take place throughout October and November. Hastings times its fireworks night to take place on the Saturday after 14 October, the date of a little skirmish that happened near here in 1066. A huge pile of wooden palettes is built on the seafront, about ten yards high, and a guy is placed on top. The bonfire is set alight on the night, and a torchlight procession of bonfire societies from all over Sussex parades through the town - one so long it takes an hour to go past any single point. Then the fireworks start. I won't try to describe how big the fireworks are - I'll just say that a few years ago they were visible in Dieppe and the French coastguard scrambled their lifeboats as they thought they were distress flares from a ship in trouble.

The finale is the burning of this years' special effigy. This is where a hated national or local figure is burned in effigy on it's own special bonfire. This is the scary bit. Two years ago the Jerwood Art Gallery was burned. Last year bankers got the treatment. This year it was effigies of hoodies and the underclass who got the blame for this summers riots.

All good clean fun? Probably. But add a few burning crosses or swastikas to the scene and then see what you think.

Semaphore

I like the night time effect I've achieved in this series if strips. It's been done by colouring the strip in the normal way (you may have noticed that it's changed to its winter colour scheme) and then adding an extra night time layer over the top, setting it to multiply and then cutting out the eyes and the white space.

I just liked the idea of Jones using tail signals.

Millie Week 10; Pt 2 8th - 10th Nov

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Coronation Street was (and still is) one of the Big Two evening soaps in the UK. EastEnders is on the BBC, is set in London, and is as miserable as sin - Coronation Street is on ITV, set in Manchester, and was as the time quite comic.

Equity is the actors union.

Millie Week 10 Pt 1; Mon 5th - Weds 7th Nov

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Twenty years ago I was living in Tunbridge Wells. Its main shopping street, Calverley Road had just been pedestrianised and a new shopping Mall had been built adjacent to it. This provided a perfect breeding ground for people with clipboards - a narrow area full of people and very few means of escape. In those days you would just get accosted by people doing surveys. Nowadays, the precinct is awash with Chuggers (short for Charity Muggers - those people who stop you in the street and try to get you to sign up to a charity for a commission), so much so that the local paper had a headline on its front page this summer warning about 'The Chugger Menace'.

That's where the first strip came from. As for the questions: At the time Whiskas cat food had the slogan '8 out of 10 cats prefer Whiskas', a phrase so famous there is now a comedy panel show about statistics (sounds unlikely, I know) called '8 out of 10 cats'. Then, sometime in the 90s, someone realised that no-one had ever consulted the cats. The slogan is now the less snappy '8 out of 10 owner say their cats prefer it'. The mintiest lager is, for the record, Special Brew. And Sky TV was just starting up - a satellite dish outside your home was at that time a pretty good signifier of being one of the lower orders. I don't know why but TV technology is subject to some rather strange inverted snobbery - my Dad was proud that our family still only had a black and white TV in 1977!

...and now we return you to our main story...

Trench warfare

I'm tying together Guy Fawkes and the upcoming Remembrance day (11th November) this year. The thought occurred to me that animals would consider the fireworks to be like missiles and guns going off, and this led to this series of first world war related strips, with the cats hiding in a trench while the explosions go on around them...

Corporal Jones is a reference to Dad's Army. I'd like to dedicate this strip to David Croft who has just died.

Gunpowder Treason and Plot

I've ignored Halloween this year in order to move straight on to Guy Fawkes night. I'm invoking a nursery rhyme here:

Remember remember
the fifth of November
Gunpowder treason and plot,
I see no reason why
Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

That reason is, of course, never explained. If the gunpowder plot is a new bit of British history to you here is that reason...

Pinkfish and cartoon science

There's been a lot of speculation about the kind of dye that Jones was covered in. Well, let me put your minds at rest. It's a special pink cartoon dye that only comes off in contact with pond water. Cartoon chemistry is like cartoon physics - it doesn't work in quite the same way as it does in the real world. We've already discussed the way that gravity only acts on a coyote two eye-blinks after becoming aware of walking off the edge of a cliff. Another example is that if a dog and a man in a green shirt encounter a ghost in a creepy room, that room will immediately elongate so that the dog and man and flee the ghost for thirty seconds without ever leaving the room. A side effect of this is that a series of identical light fittings will appear at regular intervals along said room.

Millie Week 9 Thu 1 - Sat 3 November 1990

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As tends to happen with Smith, Halloween merges seamlessly into Bonfire season.

The monster firework that Sammi brings out in the second strip was called "The Big Sadaam Multi-Megaton Big Bang Exocet Purple Screamer". Operation Desert Storm was a very recent memory so it was changed to something a little less contentious. This was probably a good thing, if it had been printed with the original name it would probably have been used by Tony Blair a decade later as evidence that Iraq had WMDs.

Millie Week 9 Mon 29 - Wed 31 October 1990

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The first strip may be familiar to people who read Smith on GoComics around this time last year. Yes, it is a recycled gag, but it's been recycled more times than you would think. It's actually a gag that I wrote in 1981, then reused in Millie in 1990, and then returned to its original characters in 2010. Expect to see it again around 2021. In 3D, probably.

Strip two is another old Smith gag (one I haven't reused) with the set up changed significantly but the punchline remaining the same.

Trick or treating was pretty rare in the UK in 1990 - it really only entered British consciousness in 1982 when ET came out. Mass produced Halloween costumes and seasonal sweets have only started appearing in supermarkets over the past three years or so. That's why it was decided to spell out exactly what was going on in the last frame - even now people are a bit hazy about the rules, so imagine what it was like 21 years ago.

I've been party to a Facebook discussion today where a friend of mine at stage school was debating her Halloween costume - should she be a Dead Tinkerbell or a Dead Wonder Woman? I think she's now been persuaded that she doesn't have to be a dead anything - so if you're in London and Princess Belle from Beauty and the Beast turns up at your door on Monday, say Hi to Lucy for me.

Here's the Smith version of strip 1...