This is a screen shot of the kind of script I used to write for the cartoon strip ‘Millie’ in the Daily Mirror for five years in the early 1990s. In those days I would have written the script on a black and white Mac SE, one of those all-in-one Macs with a screen the size of a smartphone, printed out two copies, kept one for myself and sent the other off to the cartoons and crosswords editor of MGN newspapers. He’d edit it, send the edited copy to the artist Roger Mahoney (now drawing Andy Capp) and six weeks later it would appear in the paper, sandwiched between The Perishers and Garth, and next to Russell Grant’s horoscopes.

This is very much how I would do it – while some of the writers in the Mirror would just supply dialogue and leave the artist to work out the layout I had been very much indoctrinated into the DC Comics method of working, having joined the London Cartoon Centre a few years beforehand and come under the influence of a lot of DC and Marvel A-Listers, in particular David Lloyd, Alan Moore and Paul Neary. I overwrote my panel descriptions in the same way that Alan Moore did, and was very much a subscriber to his auteur theory of comics.

It’s a Friday the Thirteenth strip today, so the dialogue I’ve used is exactly the same as I’ve used in every other Friday 13th strip.