Airing Cupboard

This little tribute to Charles Schulz introduces a series of cartoons which could be drawn and coloured really quickly, and which gave me the chance to visit Linda's folks over Christmas. Cartoonists can't go on holiday - if we want to take some time off we have to work twice as hard as usual to create a backlog of cartoons to run while we are away.

However, there isn't much to do in Clovis, New Mexico. I drew February's strips while I was in the States, and will be coloring them overthe next week. I also wrote loads of gags, and now have the strip written until Mid August.

Like a lot of things in my strips, the airing cupboard is based on one from my childhood, with sliding doors and a boiler inside it. It was in my bedroom, and used to terrify me with the strange noises it would make at night.

Millie, Week 19, Thu 10 - Sat 12 Jan 1991

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Sunday papers were hard work, especially the Sunday Times which was the weight of a telephone directory and fell apart into about 26 different sections. Nowadays, it is even larger, and about three copies will fit into a newspaper boy's bag, but at least News International have the courtesy to shrink wrap the paper now.

Millie, Week 19, Mon 7 - Wed 9 Jan 1991

Click to enlarge

I'm having trouble finding complete syndication sheets for 1991, so for the meantime I'm going back to my scrapbooks. However, this does mean that we have to deal with the discolouration that has happened to the newsprint over the ages. And for the next two weeks, I'm afraid there are some dreadful Gloy gum stains from the cheap and nasty paste that I used to stick the cartoons in with. After that I chucked the Gloy out and used Pritt stick instead.

I was a newspaper delivery boy for about two months in January and February 1976. Two months was about all I could manage - I have never been an early riser and getting up before the sun did was totally alien to my being. My habit of reading the comics in all the papers I was delivering didn't help either.

Being a delivery boy in England is a bit different to being one in the States. I had to stick the paper through the front doors of all the houses on my route. It was in the 'village' area of Tunbridge Wells, mainly old cottages and Victorian houses around a small park called The Grove. There was no way I could just cycle past and throw a paper in the general direction of the front lawn, as there weren't any.

The tabloid in the last frame was meant to be the Sun, at that time a very partisan and populist Conservative paper. The front cover reads 'Neil Kinnock eats babies'. Neil Kinnock was the Labour leader at the time. (To be fair, The Daily Mirror was an equally partisan Labour paper and could be equally childish).

Coffee

Admit it - there's nothing better than being the first one to burst open the seal over a can of coffee.

Smith's not being rude. Blue Tits are birds famed for pecking through the foil caps on bottles of milk after they have been delivered in the morning.

Doomsday

What with the planet's impending doom, economic meltdown in Europe, unrest in Russia and the middle East and another dip in the recession at home, Scrumpy must be in his element at the moment.

2012 ®

I've used the words 2012, London and Olympics in this strip - hopefully the ODA (Olympic Delivery Authority) and LOCOG (The London Organising Committeefor the Olympic Games) won't notice. I may get away with it as I'm not actually selling anything, but woe betide any company that dares to mention the Olympics, however obliquely, in their advertising unless they've paid a kings ransom in sponsorship money.

Advertisers cannot use any two of the following terms together: 'Games', 'Two thousand and twelve', '2012' and 'Twenty twelve'. Neither can they use one of those terms in conjunction with any of: 'Gold', 'Silver', 'Bronze', 'London', 'Medals', 'Sponsors', 'Summer'. Breaking the terms of the Act could result in a £20,000 fine.

So from now on I'm referring to this summer's event as "the Big City in Britain Year After 2011 Every Four Yearly Greek Sports Cluster". (TM)

Millie Week 18; Thu 3 Jan 1991 - Sat 5 Jan 1991

I actually had to do that King Lear essay when I was a kid - that's a word for word transcription.

And Millie's opinions of TS Eliot pretty well mirror my own. I will show you pretentious twaddle in a handful of dust. I deliberately got the title of The Waste Land wrong. No-one complained, which was quite surprising as poetry and the Daily Mirror have a surprisingly close connection. As recently as last year, the Poet Laureate Carol Anne Duffy selected a poem to be printed once a week in the Woman's page, and I can remember Kingsley Amis doing a poetry column while Millie was appearing in the paper. Not what you'd expect from a brash British tabloid, is it?