Fence

One of those continuous background strips I like to do every now and again, with Smith's fence-top journey getting more and more difficult with each frame. I've been pondering whether to change the format of the strip to a double deck cartoon, with two rows of pictures, one on top of the other. The advantage is that it will allow me to display bigger pictures on Sherpa, but the disadvantage is that it won't allow me to do stuff like this without a break in the middle, removing much of its impact.

Tongue

Occasionally you'll see a cat walking around with its tongue still protruding from its mouth. Cholmondeley was particularly prone to this, though it happens to all cats at some point in their life.

Millie Week 99: Mon 27 July - Sat 1 August 1992

Memories of holidays in Scotland when I was a kid, being copped up in car forever because we lived at the bottom right of Britain and we were camping in the very top left corner. And to make matters worse, our car couldn't go over 50MPH because we were towing a trailer, so the journey took forever.

Motorway service station food is fabled for its inedibility and high prices. The only place in the world that serves worse food is any steak house in the centre of London with a name beginning with 'A'. If you ever come to visit, remember that tip - you'll thank me for it.

Flight 714 actually goes from Djakarta to Sydney, as any TinTin fan will tell you..

Spin

Drawing the music festival cartoons a few weeks ago made me remember that I hadn't drawn any strips about Jones at the piano for a while. This rectifies that situation, though its more about the spinny stool than anything else.

In, out, in, out

I've caught Bella doing this. I wouldn't mind, but we live in a first floor flat. (That's a second floor apartment if you speak North American English - the first floor is called the ground floor in the UK.)

Finding Smith on GoComics

GoComics has gone a bit wibbly over the last couple of days. If you rely on the A-Z listings to find Smith every day, you'll have noticed it's no longer in its usual place - the alphabet has been scrambled. You'll now find it near the top of the left hand column. This is probably a temporary state of affairs and just the act of making this post will cause GoComics to magically repair itself, but in the meantime, there I am.

100 metres

The editor of one of the magazines I work for in real life and I were both given a copy of the 2013 Workman Publications page a day cat calendar for Christmas last year. Both working in publishing, we look at it with the jaundiced eye of media professionals (hem hem), and we both think that while the standard of photography is as high as ever, this year they left it to someone on work experience to write the captions. Most of them are on the level of "This tabby's lustrous eyes reflect the glory of a New England Fall", but occasionally a useful nugget of information appears. Such as this one...

Millie Week 98: Mon 20 July - Sat 25 July 1992

Velcro can be fun. And this possibly the only catching game I can manage. I've since got one of those baseball catching mitts, which is also a great help.

Aaaarrr!

Once a year the entire town of Hastings dresses as pirates for a day. This Sunday is that day.

This is what happened last year. 14,231 people gathered together on the beach and wrested back the official record for the largest ever pirate gathering in the world from those usurpers in Penzance, who had looted it from us the year before. I'm somewhere in that picture...

We're not trying to beat the record again this year, we'll just be having a celebration. Bizarrely, The Tampa Bay Buccaneers (an NFL football team, I'm informed) have donated a pirate ship they no longer need to the town, which now sits in dry dock in the shopping centre, looking very out of place. We're promised sky diving pirates, a stunt team of parrots, music and dancing. But most of all, the people of Hastings will be doing what they do best - being joyfully eccentric.

Mole in one

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

Golf

My tribute to those Fred Basset cartoons which invariably end with Fred thinking "You've got to do something about your slice" at his master.

I'm no good at golf. For some reason I'm unable to actually hit the ball - the club just whistles over the top of it. Either I'm too tall, the club is too short, or the ground is too low. I can see the game's appeal - it's a good excuse for a walk in the countryside with friends, I'm just unable to hit the ball.

Miniature Golf is more my kind of thing, but once again, I'm outclassed here too. Why did I have to move to the town that holds the World Crazy Golf Championship on the seafront every Autumn?

Millie Week 97: Mon 13 July - Sat 18 July 1992

At my old school the school sports day (something for which I was very happy to be a spectator every year) always led up to its grand finale, the inter-house tug of war match.

I know - school houses, how very Harry Potter. My school had four houses, and despite us being assigned to them at random on our first day it still seemed that our character was determined by the house we were put in. Knott was the sporty house, Atwell was the artistic one, Hunt was where the thugs tended to go, and Sebastian was the leftover Hufflepuff sort of house. I was assigned to Atwell.

Richard's tug of war storyline never got its payoff - I think he had to miss out on sports day due to tree-related whiplash.

Moth roast

We had halogen uplighters in our old flat in Tunbridge Wells. If you heard a 'Ftttzzzzt!' followed by a roasting smell, you could guarantee that the lamp had caught itself another victim. Every now and then we would have to upend the uplighters to pour out the charred remains into the bin.

Can you handle the cute?

 I've found some old photos of Smudge and Cholmondely from when they were kittens. I'd put them at about four months old here. Here they are running around my old flat in Tunbridge Wells, around April and May of 1996. By law kittens have to pose for photos in baskets, and Smudge and Cholmondeley don't disappoint...

Moth noises

A moth's main role in life is to torment cats by coming into a room at night and then fluttering about j-u-s-t out of reach. Billy and Annabelle are being driven mad by moths at the moment - later on in the year they're going to be sent even madder by a predicted bumper crop of Daddy Long Legs.

I've noticed that cats have a special call they make when they see a moth. It's a sort of trilling 'BRRREEEEEP!' that is unlike anything else in their vocabulary. It's not unique to Billy and Annabelle, I've heard Smudge make the same noise as well. It's invariably accompanied by a cross eyed upwards stare, as the cat tries to focus on the moth as it flutters randomly about.

Cow

A joke that was topical six months ago when I wrote it, and still keeps on leaping into topicality as foodstuff after foodstuff turns out not to be what we thought it was. Tesco's lasagne, IKEA meatballs - even the Queen's dinner at the Ascot races turned out to contain horse. And I'm left worrying what all the fuss is about.

I am one of those disgusting people that eats meat. Let's face it, it is in its basic state a dead animal - so long as it's not poisonous and fairly palatable I'm not too fussy what it is. We've been eating horse for years now and we're only upset about it because we now know that's what it is. For me it's not a health issue, it's just one of labelling.

If I was a cat I'd be more worried that among the ingredients listed on the side of a tin of cat food is something called 'Ash'. Mmmm, that sounds tasty.

Millie Week 96: Mon 6 July - Sat 10 July 1992

What I'm most happy about in this week's bunch of strips is the way one subject organically becomes another completely different one.

And yes, this was the first outing for the idea that eventually became this gag...

In the twenty years between the Millie strip and this one I've learned that anticipation of an event can be funnier than the event itself. And it's even better if you don't have to use any words, either.

Overdoing the colour

The second frame of today's cartoon took me three hours to colour to my satisfaction - normally I can get away with one colour for the sky, another for the ground, and then filling in the cats' eyes, ears and any body tint required. For this one I was concentrating on getting that dingy gig atmosphere, while also making sure Jones and the keyboard stood out. I think I succeeded, but it's a very different palette to the one I normally use.

Friday Night

I think I've managed to encapsulate the typical English small town Friday night experience in five frames here. 1) Entertainment 2) Random drunken shouting 3) Violence 4) Embarrassing drunks 5) Regret, and the promise never to do it again. Then start at stage 1 again the following Friday.

Actually there is a stage 6) The kebab. And in Hastings, a stage 7) Waking up on the beach covered in seagull poo.

Beer and Music Festival

This is the week of the Hastings Beer and Music Festival, an annual event that happens in the park a block away from my back garden. I've never been to it myself, I just sit on my balcony each evening and listen. Besides I blew my music budget for the year on seeing the Pet Shop Boys at the O2 Arena last week.

It all kicks off on Thursday with the Hastings Proms, and then the beer and music occur on Friday and Saturday. The big marquee has started going up already - this photo was taken on Saturday afternoon.