This is what they want

It may not sound appetising but it's what most domestic cats hunt and eat. Sparrow flavour wouldn't be eaten - it would just be deposited on your bed as a present.

Moo!

Anyone that has tried to feed a cat will know they can be very food-faddy. Indeed there are several brands of organic catfood now available in supermarkets for people with more money than sense. Cat's don't care if their tuna has been caught by line from carbon neutral boats - they just want it to come in the gravy they're accustomed to and from the right shaped can. My cats won't eat anything from a can that is taller than it is wide.

Here's Jones announcing a food fad regime that is no more stupid than most of the ones you find in the Sunday supplements.

Babybel

I don't know if these are available outside Europe, but the cheese Jones is swallowing whole is a Babybel - a small sphere of Edam with a red wax coating. They also come in a blue version - which is a small sphere of cheddar with a wax coating. Collect the wax afterwards - it's even more fun to fidget with than bubblewrap.

Millie Week 4, 27-29 Sept 1990

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The Saturday detentions was my old school's nuclear option. This wasn't just being held back after school, this was being called called in on a Saturday morning to serve your time. And at my school you had to wear uniform so if you were seen walking to school on a Saturday in uniform the entire town knew you were a wrong 'un. Of course, the rules of Crippen Comprehensive had to be changed in order for this week's story to reach a satisfying conclusion.

Millie Week 4 - 24-26 Sept 1990

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I used to go to a school which insisted on school uniform. In fact, I used to wear precisely the kind of blazer that Richard is wearing, usually in the same state as the last frame of the first strip. We couldn't afford new uniforms so I always wore second hand, usually two sizes too big because I was told I would 'grow into' them. Alas, I stopped at five foot four and spent most of my school years looking like David Byrne in his biiig suit.

I'm glad to say that Richard's trendy 'Madchester' outfit is never seen again after this strip.

A little technical note. You'll notice that in opening frame of each strip the first speech balloon is lower than the second. Look at all the daily Millies - it happens in each strip. What's going on there then?

The answer is pretty mundane. That was done to allow the strip's title to appear in the top left corner of the frame in the Daily Mirror. Take a look at every single Peanuts cartoon Schulz ever drew - he's working to the same constraints as well, the first speech balloon always avoids an exclusion zone.

The 3am pummel

Dedicated to Gizmo, the reason for more sleepless nights than I care to mention. He'll wait till Linda and I are both asleep before launching himself onto the bed. Then he'll work his way between us, chirruping all the while. Then he'll start pummelling, with his claws out. It's at this point that I have to wrestle him off us, and he retreats to the foot of the bed. A quarter of an hour later he starts moving up the bed and the cycle begins again. Repeat until dawn.

The trumpet in the fourth frame was never scripted but the idea occurred to me as I was drawing the strip, and it was too good to ignore.

Sleep working

I've never seen cats bring their work with them to the realm of dreams, but I can certainly vouch for it happening in humans.

Case No. 1, my Dad. He used to be a driving instructor, spending most of his time in the passenger seat trying to teach hill starts to learner drivers of assorted abilities. I can remember him falling asleep in his armchair one Sunday afternoon. Nothing unusual there, you may think. It was when he yelled "No! No! No!" and then stabbed with his foot at a phantom dual-controlled brake pedal, waking himself up, that we realised something was wrong.

Similarly, I once had an old girlfriend, who was a schoolteacher, give me a history lecture on Canadian/US diplomacy and warfare in the 19th century in her sleep. And my wife, Linda, frequently reverts back to when she was a nurse in the Burns Unit at Covenant, Lubbock, when she's asleep, reeling off lists of painkillers and drug schedules for the patients under her care.

Linda tells me I chuckle in my sleep. Maybe I'm dreaming up ideas for Smith. I wish I could remember them afterwards.

Dreams

If you've ever watched your cat twitch her way through a particularly stimulating bit of REM sleep, have you ever wondered what they're dreaming of? Smith certainly has.

Millie Week 3, Thu 20 - Sat 22 Sept 1990

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I've had more than one pair of jeans reduced to a pair of pedal pushers by over enthusiastic snipping in the past.

Millie Week 3, Mon 17 - Wed 19 Sept 1990

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From now on the scripts are all mine, and I start to build week long storylines that would start on the Monday and pay off on the Saturday.

This week's storyline was based on my inability to find any jeans for myself that were small enough. I'm a shortarse - I have an inside leg measurement of 27 inches, but live in a country that denies that legs come any shorter than 30 inches. I now bulk buy trousers whenever I'm in the States, because the shops there tend to cater more for the short and stout end of the market. (Penney's for the trousers, Dillards for the shirts.)

As the first strip may indicate, I'm best left to browse alone. Over eager shop assistants tend to make me leave for another shop.

The other two strips just come from experience.

The International Cheese Glyph

Things in cartoons tend to look like things in other cartoons rather than the things themselves*. In UK comics teachers still walk around in mortar board and cloak, testing their canes or suppleness. Burglars still wear half face masks and hooped jumpers, toting sacks with 'SWAG' written on them on their backs. Telephones still look like old wall-mounted telephones and it's only recently that televisions have developed flat screens. Mashed potatoes will always be depicted in billowy mounds heaped onto plates and with sausages sticking out of the top. And cheese will always be a yellow prism with woodworm.
*This sounds like a theme for Cubie'n'Bouncy.

Cheese

Extensive tests have shown that cats are far more interested in cheese than mice are. I've even started to find chicken and cheese flavoured cat food in the shops.

Madness. A short history in seven frames.

Madness begets madness begets madness begets madness begets madness begets madness. Little did we realise the horror of 9/11 was just the beginning. Faced with such spiralling human idiocy, the only character qualified to comment today was my little voice of gloom: Scrumpy.

For a more considered strips from Sherpa artists considering the original atrocity see Snow, Frank & Steinway, Anecdote and Onion & Pea. And maybe, Glenview Revue.

Millie Week 2: Thu 13 - Wed 17 Sept 1990

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And again, I wrote numbers one and three while John did number two (so the character's ambitions are not strictly canon).

The irony is that my wife frequently gets food parcels sent to her from the States, as her parents obviously don't trust the food we have over here. Not that I mind - no-one quite does salsa like Sadies of Albuquerque. And we Brits can't do peanut butter or root beer properly in the same way that Americans can't do cheese.

I don't care if I haven't been a teenager for 30 years, I still have a study where everything is filed on the floor, and you find things by going through geological layers of kipple till you discover the thing you want. Tidy things away and they will be lost forever.

Millie Week 2: Mon 10 - Wed 12 Sept 1990

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Once again, I wrote the two bookends and John Allard wrote the one in the middle. In other words I did the gags and John did the character establishment.

Even in 1990 House records where the lyrics mainly consisted of a stuttering sample of someone saying the word 'Jack' for three and a half minutes were old hat.

An even better twist on 'Jack' music can be seen in this advert for Citroen. The soundtrack is 'Jacques your Body' by Les Rhythmes Digitales.

Bean bag

Smudge's bean bag is getting like this, but that's how she likes it...

Grooming

The Facebook group term for this would be 'That moment when you're busy cleaning your bum and you notice a human is watching you with a silly grin on its face'.

Sometimes I do people too...

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It's not often that I get to use my cartooning skills in my day job, but here's an example that's just been published in the UK construction press. When everyone else is showing close ups of bricks and pipes and longs shots of half finished buildings, we thought we'd fight back by making our client's ads look completely different to everyone else's and using cartoons.

Publication schedule: Construction News, Construction Manager, RIBA Journal.

Credits:
Concept and copy: Mike Walter/Sally Devine/Andrew Pilcher
Art and layout: Andrew Pilcher

The face of fear

Piers Morgan and I have previous. He became editor on the Daily Mirror in the autumn of 1995, and two days later Millie was killed off so that Piers could install Tom Johnston who followed him from the Sun. Tom was cleverer than me - he would always make sure the punchlines to his cartoons were written in bold capital letters and the character speaking the punchline would have a happy face and a bit of spittle coming out of his mouth so Piers could tell where the funny part was and make the 'ha' noise in the right place. He was a far better cartoonist than his patron was an editor - he never had to resort to these tactics when drawing for anyone else.

Just for the record, I don't hate Piers. There are plenty of people all over the world who are willing to do the job for me. I've just Googled 'Piers Morgan Hate' and got back 1,490,000 results*. No, he's done far worse to far better people than me - British soldiers in Iraq, Beatles, financial journalists, any celebrity with a voicemail function on their mobile phone...

This strip was inspired by the elasticity of cats.Their ability to squeeze themselves into small spaces and expand into every patch of sunlight. Piers was an afterthought - I just needed something scary. Millie's executioner seemed to fit the bill.

* This figure may have gone up a couple of thousand by the time this blog is scheduled to appear.

Millie, Thu 6 - Sat 8 Sept 1990

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I actually wrote two of these. The odd one out is number two - don't ask me to explain that joke because I don't understand it myself.

Strip one is very summer of 1990 - at the time corn circles were being hyped up by the papers as possible evidence that we were being visited by aliens, and it all got mixed in with all night acid house parties, ecstasy, chaos theory, the first stirrings of global warming and posters of fractal imagery into a pretty heady brew of pop culture at the time. Later we were to learn that crop circles weren't the work of aliens, they were actually the work of two men called Brian, one plank of wood and a bit of string.

Strip three is also very 1990. This is the last knockings of Margaret Thatcher's premiership, and she was well in to her imperial mad as a bat phase. In the name of freedom she had passed legislation banning 'the promotion of homosexuality' in schools, and was now doing battle against 'music with repetitive beats'. By this time, outdoor parties playing acid house music were officially illegal, and the police found themselves in the strange position of chasing kids in cars all over the home counties searching for illicit raves. Strange days indeed.

Millie - week one. Mon 3 - Weds 5 Sept 1990

Click the image to see it at full size

Here are the first three. (And I must admit that I didn't actually write the first two, while the third is a remix of an unpublished Saturday strip that I've already posted.)

I was having problems working out how to restart the strip in a way that would introduce the characters to new readers without having to go back to square one again, while simultaneously keeping the Daily Mirror happy. They had a more 'traditional' sense of what was possible in a cartoon strip than I did. I made several attempts but in the end a large proportion of the first two weeks of the strip were actually written by John Allard, the Cartoons and Crosswords editor at the time. And he did a good job of it, outlining the main relationships between the characters with a broader brush than I would have used myself. My scripts were a bit more metafictional. John probably made the right decision here, considering the paper I was writing for was the tabloid of the traditional Labour-voting working class - it's not that the readership wouldn't have appreciated or understood me playing with the medium of comics, but the first three strips were probably not the place to do it.

Here are those first three rejected scripts:

Monday 3 September 1990

1. No background. Millie speaks straight to camera to introduce herself.
CAPTION: NEW READERS START HERE...
MILLIE: HI! I'M MILLIE NEVILLE. I'M FOURTEEN AND I LIVE IN GLORIOUS CATFORD.

2. She introduces us to Richard, who is giving us his best pose - the one he's been practicing in front of the mirror for ages with.
MILLIE: THIS IS MY BIG BROTHER, RICHARD. HE'S SIXTEEN AND KIND OF DRIPPY...

3. Deflated, Richard starts arguing with Millie. Millie stands fast and holds out her hand as if waiting for payment.
RICHARD: HEY, WHAT HAPPENED TO THE "THIS IS RICHARD AND HE'S REALLY HUNKY" WE AGREED ON?
MILLIE: IF YOU WANT ME TO SAY THAT YOU HAVE TO MANAGE A BETTER BRIBE THAN A PACKET OF M&Ms.


Tuesday 4 September 1990

1. Sammi stands in front of a blank background. She is simpering in the direction of the person in the next frame.
CAPTION: THIS IS SAMMI. SHE'S IN MILLIE'S CLASS AT SCHOOL AND QUITE FANCIES RICHARD BECAUSE HE'S 'KIND AND SENSITIVE'.

2. Richard in front of a blank background. He drools in the direction of frame three.
CAPTION: THIS IS RICHARD. HIS HORMONES TEND TO GO ALL WIBBLY WHENEVER HE'S IN THE VICINITY OF GEMMA.

3. Gemma. Blank background. Looking at next frame. Drool etc.
CAPTION: THIS IS GEMMA. SHE HAS SO MANY ADMIRERS THAT SHE PREFERS TO IGNORE THEM UNLESS THEY'VE GOT A 'REALLY LUSH MOTOR'.

4. A Porsche 911 Carrera. Millie interrupts the strip by walking in front of the car as if it were part of a slide show. Her speech balloon partially obscures the caption.
CAPTION: THIS IS A PORSCHE 911 CARRERA.
MILLIE: SORRY ABOUT THIS. NORMAL SERVICE WILL BE RESUMED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE...

Wednesday 5 September 1990

1. Millie's bedroom. She leaps out of bed, bright and early in the morning.
MILLIE: THIS IS BRILL!

2. Kitchen. Millie in her dressing gown, pouring herself some cornflakes. She addresses the audience.
MILLIE: NOW I'VE GOT A DAILY STRIP I CAN DO WHAT I WANT ALL WEEK!

3. Richard comes in, bleary eyed, wearing school uniform.
RICHARD: UNFORTUNATELY, TODAY'S BACK TO SCHOOL DAY, MILLIE.

4. Millie and Richard leaving for school. She now has her uniform on. She addresses the audience again, annoyed.
MILLIE: WHEN I FIND OUT WHO'S IN CHARGE OF THIS STRIP THERE'S GOING TO BE TROUBLE...

The mystery of the missing background

I didn't realise that I'd forgotten about the background in the last two panels until I started on the colouring.

The sound effect 'Gronff' is one I've borrowed from The Perishers, (see previous entries). Of course nowadays the accepted sound effect for cats eating is 'Nom nom nom' but that seems far too polite to me.

The Perishers, written by Maurice Dodd, Drawn by Dennis Collins. 1968.

Millie minus two...

Two days left to go before Millie starts up again on this blog, on the 21st anniversary of its commencement as a daily strip.

Look at that circulation figure, incidentally. 3,916,690! Newspapers nowadays would kill for a circulation like that, but at the time The Daily Mirror was playing Avis to The Sun's Hertz Rentacar - it was running second so it was trying harder. To be fair, the figure there included the Daily Mirror's Scottish sister paper, The Daily Record, with which it shared a fair amount of content, but even so, strip out the Record's circulation and you still had a figure of over three million copies. Which now I've sat down and thought about it, makes me feel a tad dizzy.