Millie Week 26, Mon 25 Feb - Sat 2 March 1991

This is the comics equivalent of one of those improvisation games where you are handed a prop and asked to come up with as many different uses for it as you can. Richard has a plaster cast and I'm going to play it for all it's worth.

The first three are definitely memories of my own broken leg at school. I ended up wearing a badge saying 'I slipped on some ice' to stop having to explain for the fiftieth time how I'd ended up with a plaster on my leg. It wasn't strictly true. Actually I'd been walking carefully over the icy quadrangle at school when I felt something in my right knee go 'ping'. And that was it. No dramatic falls, no blood, just the tiniest of sounds. And then, every thousand strides or so, I'd find my right leg would decide not to bear my own weight any more... But that wouldn't fit on a badge.

The 'Don't ask' strip is an example of a gag construction I use now and again in Smith - one where the slapstick happens at the beginning of the strip but it only becomes funny when the results are observed by a third party a while afterwards.