Though I make the strips, it's usually Damian (pdc) who selects the icon. This morning (while I was still asleep, probably) he decided to go for the purple throbbing moths making off my trousers (paging Dr Freud!) using gifsicle to unpick and recreate the animation for this week's strip. It was a bit of a hellish one for me, I'd been up late finishing it (though everything more or less worked, I wasn't happy with anything) but it was really nice that when I staggered upstairs this morning, the first thing Damian said to me was, "You did an animated one, you haven't done one of those for ages". True. Since the heady days of chicken dance I've not had much to say that requires a two-frame animation. Confetti guns, though ...

The orginal idea was that there wouldn't be anything in the strip that wasn't a toy in my room, but I rather blew that on the aforementioned moths (based on the pink floppy beanie moth, which I've stroked in shops but never bought) and I unfortunately don't own a roller-skating gin-serving lizard-man either. Damn it. However, this does feature [Panel 1] Halloween danglers Mr Satan and Baron Samedi, with old friend rag-doll Lucy [panel 4] my translucent plastic dinosaur CD holders and the plastic scorpion I couldn't find anywhere last night [panel 6] Tiny the Brontosaurus, the redder one of my two two-headed monsters and my fab confetti gun and of course [panels 7-9] Beautiful Suzy the mannequin.

The irony of it is that I wrote this strip on a day I did go to work, even though I felt like shit. I'm still trying to work through the migraines (with the help of medication) rather than around them, and so I went to the whole-day meeting on Monday. Which was fun.

I guess it's true that we write about what we don't do.