It’s our subterranean, antipodean friend Ben’s birthday today… Happy birthday, Ben.

I was going to draw a comic about birthdays for you today, but the truth is I couldn’t think of anything that would stretch over three cells… dogma you see, Sunday strips are always three-celled. I don’t know why, and you’d think, because I make the rules, that I could break them… apparently not.

The first idea I had was a birthday cake with sticks of TNT instead of candles, Ben’s Birthday Bash. Then I got on to thinking about party games and go side-tracked by the idea that postal workers probably didn’t like playing ‘pass the parcel‘… still no good, so then I started thinking about fancy dress parties…

Fancy dress parties, plus Ben… it awoke a character from my childhood. Mr Benn.

I’m not sure how well travelled he is, but the children’s books and the cartoon about a stereotypically British man (Bowler hat and all that) who liked to dress up and have adventures appealed to me. He’s sort of like a superhero with many costumes.

The theme tune runs through my head whenever I’m in a changing room.

Here’s a quick video I found on Youtube… You’ll notice the classic line ‘As if by magic, the shopkeeper appeared’… In geeky terms, that line has appeared in so many RPG games over the years as I direct homage to the cartoon.

I’ll probably draw the cake with TNT this week though, back when the single strips are acceptable. In the meantime I’m going to try and work out why I set the three-cell rule in the first place.