Millie Week 43, Mon 1 - Sat 6 July 1991

I'd very rarely have to bat when I was playing cricket at school. I was definitely a 'tail-end Charlie', and a very reluctant batter. My aim would be to get myself out as quickly as possible without causing injury to myself or anyone else.

I was parodying all those Empire-era school stories I used to read when I was a child. You know the ones - Blenkinsop Minor, the brilliant but penniless scholarship boy in the first form, doing his best to fit in with the others at Bluefriars school in his hand-me-down uniform but never quite succeeding until the day he finds himself at bat, facing the son of Lord Squittington at the very end of a hard and bitterly fought house cricket match between Slytherin and Griffindor. Or something like that. He needs one run to draw, two to win. The ball is hurled at him, he flexes his arms, the bat describes a graceful arc through the languid summer air and connects with the ball with a heathy thwack. The ball is found the following day, somewhere in the next county, and Blenkinsop Minor is a hero, finally accepted as a good egg by the entire school, apart from the bitter and scheming heir to the Squittington millions... Etc.

This is very much my take on that sort of situation. It may not be cricket, but then what is?

For those that don't know the rules of cricket, I'd better explain what Millie does in the fifth strip. She effectively commits cricket suicide by knocking the bales off the wicket. Normally that should be done by the other team, but it's perfectly possible to make yourself out by accidentally knocking your own bales off. I know I've done it before, simply by not looking where my bat was going when preparing to wallop a ball hurled in my direction.

Millie Week 42, Mon 24 - Sat 29 June 1991

This was me poking fun at the kind of people who take sports deadly seriously. I never saw the point of it at school and that attitude has carried over into adult life. We won the game - that's nice - but it doesn't actually mean anything does it? I like to annoy sports obsessives by referring to their precious games and kickball and hitball - as Maisie used to do in The Perishers.

Millie Week 41, Mon 17 - Sat 22 June 1991

Something strange happened to the colouring in Monday's strip. Keith suddenly turned black for a week. I can see why it happened - at the time the West Indies bowlers were the most feared in the world so it was natural that the Mirror's colourist would paint him brown. But only two months beforehand he'd been a pasty white punk destroying the stage in the youth club. He returned to his normal colouring after I phoned to complain.

A few neat touches in the following day's strip. The massed ambulances next to the pavilion in the first frame. And anyone who has an old fashioned pav in their school grounds will recognise the ambience of the interior Roger's distilled into a few simple lines in the second frame. Every pavilion in the country must have the same battered old table in the middle of the room as its single piece of furniture.

y666666666t. (Sorry, Gizmo just made a comment with his paw there.)

Millie's in my usual fielding position, long on (or long off, its equivalent on the other side of the pitch, in the next county). The only exercise I used to get playing cricket was running from one side of the pitch to the other once every six balls.

Millie Week 40, Mon 10 - Sat 15 June 1991

When I was a kid I used to read Peanuts religiously. It all made sense to me, apart from one thing. What was that game that involved standing on semicircles in big hats and one oversized glove that Charlie Brown was no good at? I'd never come across it before. What was a shortstop (and do dogs normally play in that position)? What was the significance of sliding? How does one load a base? It was totally baffling.

So, once I had my own cartoon strip, handled in the States by King Features, I decided to have my revenge, with this month-long storyline about cricket, specifically written to confuse Americans.

However, it went down very well in my other main market, India and Pakistan. Yes, Millie was seen in the sub continent at the time. To be honest it was pirated, along with all the other strips in the Daily Mirror. I never saw a penny of royalties from all the papers that printed smudgy versions of strips that had been run in the Mirror a few days before and then got photocopied and faxed to Bangalore or wherever. But I sort of felt flattered that someone would bother.

There's an irony behind that first strip. England hadn't been having a very good time of it that summer, but on the day that strip came out England won its first test match against the West Indies for about ten years. It's a frightening power I have there - I promise only to use it for good.

Wednesday's strip is based on personal experience. The First XI cricket pitch was considered to be sacred ground by some of the teachers in my school, even when it was a muddy patch of ground four months out of season in the middle of the winter. I still remember being shouted at for walking across this nondescript patch of grass in rugby boots during one interminable games afternoon. "ARE YOU SOME KIND OF IDIOT, PILCHER?". No, I'm not the one getting angry about using some waterlogged turf as a short cut to a rugby game I don't want to participate in. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

I have no idea what the apparatus in the first frame of strip four is called, but it's made out of curved wooden slats and is used in fielding practice, especially for those fielding close to the batsman. A ball gets thrown into the thing and the curves and slats randomises how it comes out again, so you need very quick reflexes to catch the ball as it whizzes out again.

Number 11 was my usual position in the batting order. It was a good place to be - if your team was winning you had little fear of having to bat, you could just sit on a grassy bank and watch the game progress very slowly. Of course, you still had to field for half the afternoon, but if you were in the outfield there was little chance of the ball every coming anywhere near you. Lucy from Peanuts was the model for my fielding style. I never caught a single ball in my entire school fielding career.

In the final strip Millie is facing Sammi in the nets - another bit of cricket training equipment, essentially a single wicket in a net box so bowlers and batters can practice without having to spend most of their time retrieving their balls from the far distance.