Fish heads

I was contemplating whether to colour in the fish guts a bright red or not, but decided against it.

Fishing beach

Here we are at Hastings fishing beach. Hastings has the largest beach-harboured fishing fleet in Europe, we keep on being told. What that actually means is that the original harbour got washed away in a big storm in the 13th century and we still haven't got around to replacing it yet. Though to be fair, the same storm did strand the ports of Winchelsea and Rye directly to the east of Hastings a couple of miles inland.

The tall black weatherboarded structures that you see in the photo (and which you see the bottom of in the cartoon) are net huts. They're kind of like multi-storey garden sheds, a result of the lack of space between the cliffs and the shore for buildings to be put up on. Some of the fisherman store their nets and tackle in them. They don't actually hang their nets up to dry in them - that's just a story we like to tell tourists.

There are also a few wholesale fishmongers on the beach. As Jones has just discovered...

Millie 23

Daily Mirror, Saturday September 1st 1990

And that was it for Millie's incarnation as a weekly strip. The new daily schedule coincided with the start of the school year, which was useful. The strip was based on my usual state at the end of the summer holidays - I'd have to do a book report on something really tedious and would invariably leave it until around 5pm on the day before the start of the new term. I remember doing an overview of Graham Greene's 'The Power and the Glory' in that time.

(Incidentally - is Greene still considered part of the pantheon of Lit Gods any more? When I was at school, just before he died, he was huge. His star seems to have fallen a bit since then, and I'm glad to see his 'entertainments' are now regarded in higher esteem than his Catholic guilt saturated 'serious' stuff. He's worthy but he's no longer Important.)

I have a couple of DVD extras of weeklies that were drawn but never got published due to the rapidity of the format change. After those Millie will take a rest for a month and begin again in September, so the strips sync up with their publication 21 years ago.

Return of the skateboard

Like I said, it's downhill all the way to the seafront. If it was uphill Hastings would be underwater. The cars are amalgams of assorted 1990s and 2000s models, and the street scene behind is based on Queens Road in Hastings, a street of charity stores and Eastern European corner shops which is much less impressive than the name would suggest. (Though I highly recommend the food you can get at those corner shops - Romanian cuisine is not that far distant from that of New Mexico - though it involves a higher proportion of root vegetables.)

Bus

I never ride buses. I think I see buses as a sort of admission of defeat that I couldn't be bothered to walk to my destination, so I never take them. Besides, you have to be either under fourteen or over sixty to be seen dead in one. Or one of those men of a certain age that take books of bus routes to bed with them at night.

Before one of those men writes in, I'd better admit now that the colour scheme of this bus is inaccurate. Hastings Arrows buses are a fetching blue white and orange. This bus has a fairly typical tasteless privatised colour scheme of teal and fuscha.

Bus pass

..and thus begins this year's first big summer storyline...

Actually the seafront is twenty minute's walk way, all downhill, but I'm allowing for little cat legs here.

Millie 22

Daily Mirror, Saturday August 25 1990.

This is where the story really starts. I'd been pestering the Daily Mirror to go daily for six months by this time. As far as they were concerned I was serving out a period of apprenticeship. They wanted to make sure that I could sustain the treadmill that a daily strip can become before entrusting one to me.

This strip, which is essentially an entire week's worth of strips distilled down into six single panels with a punchline in each one, was what finally persuaded them I was ready. Two weeks later Millie started appearing on a Monday-Saturday schedule.

The colour scheme in frame two effectively hides a vital bit of information for deciphering the joke. Obscured behind the red stripe on the brim of Gemma's hat are the words 'Kiss Me Quick', a traditional slogan found on hats sold at the coast. They don't appear anywhere inland. I don't know why. They don't sell rock-candy reproductions of full English breakfasts more that 100 yards away from the sea either. I feel a geography thesis coming on...

The Moo for England shirt Sammi is holding up was a reference that that year's must have fashion item  the Inspiral Carpets' 'Mad as Fuck' T-shirt with the picture of the mad cow on it.

Moo.

Feel the Dynamic Tension in frame four.

This was also the summer of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Hero Turtles, name-checked as an ice cream flavour in frame five. The country was in the grip of Turtlemania and the syndicated strip had started to appear in the Daily Mirror, and continued to appear for about a year until the fad blew itself out after a disappointing movie sequel. Note the name change, made after a tabloid scare story about five year old kids throwing nunchucks about. These unnecessary name changes happen occasionally. Top Cat became Boss Cat in the UK because his name was the same as a brand of cat food (though the theme song stayed exactly the same).

All the ice cream vans in Kent and Sussex come from a lair in Hastings. I know this because if I get stuck behind one on the way to work in Tunbridge Wells I usually end up arriving ten minutes late.