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.

The one Gizmo projectile vomited over.

You think you've got critics - I have a cat that vomits over the strips that he doesn't like! I made the mistake of leaving the book that I draw these strips in open on the floor in the study (I draw on the floor - a habit I've never got out of since I drew cartoons as a kid) and then going out of the house. I also made the mistake of not hanging up my jacket and leaving it on the back of my office chair. Then I fed Gizmo and left the house for an hour.

When I came back I found that Gizmo had decided to bolt his food, then sit on the back of my chair. Then he exploded. There was pureed cat food all over the carpet, the chair, my jacket, and the cartoon book. Blee!

The jacket's survived, thanks to some nifty work by the dry cleaners, though I shall treasure forever the look of horror on the face of the counter assistant when I first produced the jacket, explaining that my cat was possessed by demons. The carpet has a nasty stain and needs cleaning. The worst of the blee was scraped off the cartoon - thankfully I don't use water based inks - and some photoshop work got rid of the rest. The final result is above - while an initial scan of what I had to work with is below.

Cartoon nerds will also note the use of photo-blue pencil to make the initial sketches, and the fact that I actually paste in archy's typewritten dialogue rather than add it in post-production.

Gizmo - biding his time....

Finish this limerick

...or maybe it's best you don't.

The return of archy

You can work out what archy meant to type by consulting a computer keyboard and substituting each character for the one directly to the right. The keyboard this was worked out on was an Apple bluetooth one - Windows machines may not have all their keys in the same position.

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.

Grabbers

More seafront amusements - this one based on the arcade on The Stade, facing the London Trader pub. It's fronted by a series of penny-in-the-slot machines, chock full of licensed soft toys that are just that smidgen too small to be held properly by the mechanical claws that are supposed to deliver your prize to you. I pass this place every time I collect some fish and chips from the Lifeboat, Hastings best chippy, and the idea came to me when I saw that one of the machines was full of Hello Kittys. I changed it to Garfield, as he's just as heavily merchandised but means more to me than any of Sanrio's kawaii menagerie of creatures.

Personally, I'm addicted to the 2p cascades inside the arcade. They fascinate me. I have a jar full of tuppennies on my desk, which I collect specially to use on those machines. I never win anything worthwhile on them - it's just fascinating to see the coins pile up and then tumble - it's like an engineering puzzle, and quite hypnotic.

Swan Lake

Back to the swan boating lake on the seafront. This isn't the first time humans have appeared in the strip - that momentous occasion was a couple of weeks back, the first time we visited this location, and before that we had some people in cars and buses a year ago. You'll see some more in a month's time. However, one thing I'm determined to do is only use people as set dressing. Smith and Jones won't interact directly with people in the strip. If ever they do, as with the humans they share a house with, it all takes place quite deliberately off-frame.

However, I've indulged myself with a pretty idealised portrait of Linda and I in the boat to the far left of the frame.