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 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.