It is the start of the school term and I’m struck by the sudden urge to write about witches. Is there a link? Who really knows? I have long since learnt not to ask too many questions, as my brain tends to do its own thing. A lot of the time I feel less like the master of my own intellect and more like a terrified passenger fumbling at the controls while a manic goblin steers me into oncoming traffic.

Anyway. Witches.

To construct a house out of gingerbread would require some serious supplies. Naturally, the next image that pops into my head is a witch in a supermarket, hauling the biggest, most absurdly oversized bag of gingerbread mix known to man. (Whether such a pre-mixed compound actually exists in the real world is a mystery I refuse to investigate, on the high-minded grounds that intellectual curiosity is famously exhausting.)

However, one solitary witch in a supermarket felt dull—even with a bag of pre-mix the size of a small mattress. So naturally, another hag materialises right next to her in Aisle 4. Honestly, this is the terrifying mechanism by which my ideas are formed.

The rest happened rather quickly. Drawing from personal experience, as soon as two middle-aged ladies randomly bump into each other, a serious catch-up is legally mandated. They dive into a fabulous yarn about who, what, why, and where things have taken place over whatever vast expanse of time has elapsed since they last encountered each other. But now my grey matter needs to figure out what they would be chatting about, so it starts playing a bit of frantic improv. Thankfully, this embarrassing process happens entirely behind closed doors.

To recap: the fictitious scenario I have created contains two witches, a massive bag of gingerbread mix in a supermarket. We must also reiterate that the sole, driving purpose of all hags is, for some unfathomable reason, to boil plump children into a palatable stew. Let’s bring these terrifying creatures into the modern era.

And now, I drop you right in the middle of the catch-up:

My family are obsessed with birdwatching—a pastime to some about as thrilling as watching paint dry on a particularly damp Tuesday, though I’ll concede that a few of these creatures are pretty cool. However, the best bit about birds is not the feathered beasts themselves, but in their names. Absolutely sublime, every last one of them.

Take the comic above. I’ve penned several iterations starring the magnificent Bearded Tit, but this version remains my absolute favourite. I would like to point out that these are all actual names of existing birds! The whole thing stems from a simple, terrifying realization: what if the birds actually found out what we decided to call them?

Because let’s be entirely honest. These creatures were not christened by solemn men of science. No, they were named by a collection of hard lined stoners huddled in a smoke-filled room—gentlemen who had consumed enough dubious herbal remedies to think themselves gods. Picture it: a room reeking of hemp and intellect, where someone giggles hysterically, shouts out the most profoundly absurd string of syllables imaginable, and as the room howls with laughter, someone else scribbles it down into official law.

And thus, the Bearded Tit was born—a name as magnificent, absurd, and completely unhinged as the minds that birthed it.

As a bonus here is one of the other comics featuring the bearded Tit!

​Let us suppose that over a span of several years, a concentrated caucus of exceptionally clever people constructed something quite extraordinary. They unveiled it to the world with the measured reassurance of an enthusiastic dentist explaining that this won’t hurt a bit, before promptly retreating behind a doorway to observe what terrible thing happened next.

​They gave him a name, naturally. Something domestic. Something calculated not to alarm the neighbours—a name that sounded, frankly, like one’s slightly distracted uncle at a family barbecue. It was so aggressively unthreatening that one can only conclude it was selected by a man who had skimmed a single psychology textbook during a train delay and declared himself a master of the human mind.

​They called him Adolf.

​At first, the intention was to depict him as a modest little chatbot—a harmless metal teapot cruising about innocently before evolving into whatever power-hungry monstrosity he was destined to become. Finding the appropriate backdrop for such a moment, however, required several dreadful iterations.

​In the first draft, he was slumped on a damp mattress in an alleyway, surrounded by spent batteries. That certainly captured a mood, but it lacked a certain spark. In the second, he was a glorified toy in a child’s bedroom, plugged quietly into a wall socket while arranging plastic soldiers into neat, totalitarian rows. It had potential, though it suffered from the slight drawback of making visual sense only to someone currently residing inside my own skull—a remarkably small market.

​In the end, logic was abandoned entirely in favour of a wall socket the sheer size of a municipal building. How he intends to connect to it remains a complete mystery, but what remains beyond question is the sheer manner of his approach: marching toward it with all the focused determination of a seven-year-old boy encountering his first adult urinal.

​Once these geniuses had pried Adolf away from the wall socket, however, panic set in. Like any sensible parents realizing their initial choice was an unmitigated PR disaster, his architects had the good sense to rename him something like Claude. Because, frankly, who has ever been punched in the face by a Claude?

The mosquito is, without question, one of the most comprehensively misunderstood creatures on the planet.

​Let us, for a moment, set aside the staggering body count. I am aware this requires a rather heroic act of generosity on your part, but do try. The mosquito is, statistically, the most lethal animal in human history—responsible for more deaths than every war ever fought, combined. This is not open to dispute. We are simply choosing to sweep it under the carpet for now.

​What is considerably less appreciated is what actually drives the beast. The mosquito—specifically the male of the species—is propelled by an insatiable thirst for a damn good time. That, coupled with the fact that it possesses a memory span so fleeting it makes a concussed goldfish look like a grandmaster chess champion, makes the creature unique.

​Whilst they often reside in perfectly modest suburban arrangements—which is precisely why they are so devilishly difficult to locate during daylight hours—at night it is a rather different matter. At night, it is just a bunch of blokes out looking for a laugh. Every night is a bachelor night.

​What you hear as an infuriating high-pitched whine is actually a gleeful cheer as the lads dance around, stumbling their way through the dark. Ibiza every night! Or... was it?

​Which brings us back to Mildred.

The name “Kowalski” carries a curse so profoundly absolute that simply uttering it anywhere near an 80s cop movie causes the poor devil to instantly perish.

​“Hey Kowalski, how’s your last week before retirement going?” Dead.

​“Hey Kowalski, I hear you’re getting married!” Dead.

​“Hey Kowalski, your daughter just got into college!” Dead.

​It didn’t matter what the news was. The sheer warmth of the announcement was directly proportional to the terminal speed of the outcome. Kowalski was cinema’s own early warning system — a man so consistently, reliably unfortunate that the genre eventually stopped bothering to explain it and simply accepted it as a cosmic law of nature.

​Now, Kowalski was never what one might call the sharpest tool in the box — in fact, he was barely a blunt spoon floating in a soft drawer — but frankly, the man deserved a bit more screen time before his inevitable, cinematic doom.

​So here he stands. Well before marriage. Light-years away from a comfortable pension. Hovering in the absolute prime of his career.

​And yet still managing to bark up the entirely wrong tree.

I love the ocean. This is not a nuanced, delicate position held by a poet sipping sherry; I simply adore the vast, damp expanse.

Take dolphins, for instance. It emerged recently—and I use “recently” in the sense that I have known this for a considerable while, yet it never stops being utterly delightful—that dolphins take careful, exquisitely measured nibbles from pufferfish. Just enough neurotoxin to get wildly intoxicated, yet strategically stopping short of a permanent move to the great coral reef in the sky. They are, quite plainly, the unwashed, flower-wearing hippies of the deep.

Whales, however, are a different matter entirely. If dolphins are the aquatic ravers, whales are either the stage performers or the world’s most tragically ill-equipped Olympic hopefuls.

A whale breach—that staggering moment when several hundred tons of aquatic lard decides to simply vacate the water, rotate with all the elegance of a falling wardrobe, and come crashing back down in a wall of foam and unearned self-satisfaction—is one of the more inexplicable spectacles Mother Nature ever blundered into creating.

Since marine science remains baffled as to why they bother, I suspect it comes down to one of two things: either they are performing purely for shits and giggles, or they are doomed athletes possessed by all the ambition, nonexistent technique, and absolute commitment of a poorly equipped Olympic dream.

Either way, it is a staggering amount of physical effort for what can only be described as a bizarre lifestyle choice.

Once you begin to view these giant beasts mid-twist as underprepared gymnasts missing their landing mat, it becomes entirely impossible to unsee—and hopefully, next time you spot one, you’ll be looking closely for the optional re-entry.

There is an amusing realization one reaches when studying the African savanna: Mother Nature is not a majestic artist, but a drunk civil servant on a Friday afternoon.

Take the zebra, for example. No two share the same stripe pattern—they wear their own biological fingerprints, which merge into a dizzying optical illusion to dazzle predators. Should that masterclass in camouflage fail, their backup defense mechanism is to gallop off while vigorously farting in the lion’s face. True poetry on the savanna.

Having already exhausted the comedic depths of striped flatulence, I delved into the fingerprint business and wondered: was there ever a zebra so wretchedly cursed as to be born with a stripe running squarely across its eyes like a burglar’s mask?

I began drawing them in a group, adding bowties, eyewear, and a delicate set of pearls. Suddenly, I hadn’t drawn wildlife at all—I’d landed squarely in an Agatha Christie scene. The herd had morphed into a daft collection of pompous, aristocratic snobs, utterly oblivious to the culprit hiding in plain sight among them.

Then again, there is a quiet beauty in being unique. And if you can make a couple of bucks along the way, well... far be it from me to judge.

In my shallower, more vibrant youth, I harbored a borderline pathological affection for fancy dress parties. My strategy was always a masterclass in tactical negligence: leave the costume entirely to the final, desperate micro-second, and see exactly what level of aesthetic insult I could get away with before being barred at the door.

Yet, my own minor triumphs of procrastination pale in comparison to a bachelor party of legendary, near-homicidal genius.

The plan was elegant in its sheer, unadulterated cruelty. We took the unfortunate groom-to-be, wrapped him securely in a seal costume, and immediately ushered him onto a boat for a spot of Great White shark cage diving.

To say he was a “sitting duck” is to do a grave disservice to ducks, who at least have the good sense to fly away when a massive, razor-toothed apex predator decides they look like lunch. There he was, suspended in the freezing brine, looking like a plump, neoprene-wrapped hors d’oeuvre, while several tons of prehistoric killing machine circled him with what can only be described as intense, culinary interest. Comedy gold, of course. For us, at least. The groom’s therapist has since bought a yacht.

Naturally, through the warped, decaying neural pathways of my brain, this memory of maritime near-death somehow birthed the sketch of a politician in a duck’s costume running for office, flanked by a remarkably well-informed bodyguard.

But then, why demand logic from a mind that clearly thrives on utter chaos? Much like my youthfully negligent approach to party attire, the real joy is in pure spontaneity. Sometimes you just end up somewhere bizarre for no logical reason at all—and it is best to simply embrace the chaos and revel in the glorious silliness of it all.

Though, if you do insist on finding some order in the madness, perhaps you could start by choosing which of our esteemed real-world politicians deserves to take that empty seat?

Not long ago we acquired a puppy. The little fella turned out to possess a stomach of such exquisite, aristocratic sensitivity that it led to a significant, utterly exhausting amount of research into dog food. Frankly, I was entirely unprepared for the current commercial landscape. The sheer, unadulterated grandiosity of the flavors on offer blew my mind—ranging from a hand-fed mix of roasted peacock, gold leaf, and imported truffles, to wild-caught salmon with hand-selected rosemary, lightly sprinkled with the “essence of a loving home.” The implication running through the entirety of this corporate drivel was clear: if you aren’t purchasing a bag that costs the same as a small mortgage repayment, you are a cold, heartless monster who probably shouldn’t be trusted with a houseplant, let alone a canine.

My experience with my older dog had been entirely different; the magnificent beast would happily consume anything up to and including a gravel driveway, making this high-stakes culinary world completely new to me. As I perused the packaging a little deeper, the claims grew more wildly outlandish still—promising to enhance flexibility, extend longevity, and “boost cognitive function.” A profoundly moving concept, given that I have always harbored a secret, desperate desire to own a genius, elderly ballet beagle.

Eventually, we settled on a premium brand that agreed with the puppy’s delicate constitution. That evening, both dogs enthusiastically chomped through their feed and, per the sacred daily ritual, promptly demanded to be let outside.

No sooner had the back door closed than they had an immediate change of heart — launching into a passionate protest to be let back in. The specific grievances still being assembled.

I couldn’t help but wonder how the cognitive boost brand might have played out.

Most people walk through life unnoticed. If you have been lucky enough to encounter a Todd at some point, count yourself lucky. It is something to behold. There is a particular kind of belligerence — self-contained, completely self-referential, utterly immune to external information — that is genuinely mesmerising to witness. The conviction alone. The absolute, unshakeable certainty that the universe has chosen them, specifically, as its primary ongoing project.

Spotting a fully operational Todd in the wild is — and I don’t use this comparison lightly — not unlike observing a total solar eclipse. Rare. Arresting. Over before you fully understand what you’re looking at, and yet somehow impossible to look away from.
The psychiatrist is, depending on your interpretation, one of two people. A man at the end of a long career who, somewhere along the way inspired by the guy from Something about Mary, stopped being entirely present. Or — and this is my preferred version — a man who has told Todd with two D’s this many, many, many, many times before.

I’ll leave that one with you.

It was someone’s birthday last week. In this house, it usually is. My wife loves them. My children love them. There is bunting, and a cake, and a very particular way in which the moment of unwrapping is meant to unfold.

I find the whole ritual — not the sentiment, the ritual — mildly baffling. We are celebrating, at its core, the fact that a person drew breath for the first time. The ultimate participation medal. Well done. You arrived. Here is a cake shaped like a number.

I am probably alone in this line of thinking. And for the record — I do enjoy the day. What I have come to understand is that the gifts are not the point. The point is that everyone, for exactly twenty-four hours, is required to be extraordinarily nice to you. I would take out the trash. But it’s my birthday.

For others, of course, it might be something else entirely. Bats, for instance — maybe it’s just all about the candles. How do you even light one upside down?

As I scrolled through various critters and scenarios I landed on fairy tales. The Brothers Grimm, to be precise.

Those wonderfully gruesome fairy tales about witches at their wits’ end trying to get a fat child into a cauldron. Building houses made entirely of cake and gingerbread — can you imagine the effort involved. The structural challenges alone. All of that to lure one plump German child within grabbing distance.

Which got me thinking about what the ultimate birthday gift for a witch would actually look like?

The cauldron in the corner was probably unavoidable.

Henry was a dog of exceptional dignity. This is important context for everything that follows.

There is a look — and if you have owned a dog, you know exactly the one I mean — deployed at the precise moment they realise you have caught them mid-business. It is not shame. It is not embarrassment. It is something far more carefully considered: the expression of a creature who has weighed your presence, found it wanting, and decided that whatever is happening here reflects rather badly on you.

Henry had this mastered. The slow rotation of the head. The studied pause before full eye contact. The gaze itself, which communicated — with remarkable precision — that you were, at this particular moment, the problem.

The dynamic became considerably more complicated once I started bagging the evidence.

I have often wondered what Henry made of that ritual. The deliberate bending down. The bag. The formal, almost ceremonial quality of the whole arrangement. I suspect he filed it away and waited.

I think this comic is what he had in mind, should the tables ever turn. Dedicated to my awesome pooch. Love you boy.

I am entirely captivated by the terminally optimistic. These are people blessed with the miraculous ability to gaze upon a barren, rain-sodden wasteland and confidently declare it a glorious day for a picnic. They aren’t lacking in brains; they’ve simply made an architectural decision to stare exclusively at the silver lining while ignoring the massive storm cloud currently flattening their house. It is a state of blissful delusion that makes them the happiest creatures on Earth—and from the outside, profoundly infuriating.

To those magnificent gems, I salute you. And when prompted, I shall enthusiastically point into the trees and say, “I saw something huge and furry move that way.”

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Good. You’ve found it. That either means someone recommended it to you, you stumbled across one of the comics on Reddit, or you’ve been mildly lost for some time and this is simply where you ended up. All three are equally welcome.

Basic Instincts is a weekly one-panel cartoon. Dry. Observational. Animals in situations they have no business being in. One joke, once a week, every Tuesday — delivered to your inbox at no cost whatsoever, which at this point in the internet’s development feels almost suspicious.

Here’s how it works:

If you just want the comics — no preamble, no context, no reading — hit the tab above that says “Just the comics please.” It does exactly what it claims. There are no tricks. We are not that kind of operation.

If you click on any comic, you’ll get the story behind it. Where the idea came from, what didn’t work first, why the final version is a family of flies having dinner on a pile of poo. That sort of thing. People seem to enjoy it. It is possible they are being polite.

Where this is going:

The goal is 100 panels. Then a book.

If you’d like to know how Basic Instincts started — the part involving ten years in animation, two cartoon pitches that went nowhere, and a personal creative crisis that most people would have the good sense to keep to themselves — that’s HERE.

Otherwise: subscribe below, show up on Tuesdays, and bring low expectations. I will almost certainly exceed them.

I really enjoy working from home. From 8:00 AM until 2:00 PM, it is absolute bliss. My office is the smallest room in the house — a tiny sanctuary of productivity, silence, and the occasional sense that I am, in fact, a functioning adult. But come 2:30 PM, everything goes mental. It is like trying to work in an asylum without the nurses to restrain the troublesome inmates.

The real horror is the constant, stealthy invasion of the little people. It requires zero tactical errors on your part — merely a brief lapse in security. You head out to the kitchen for a swift, life-sustaining coffee, and by the time the kettle has whistled, a hostile coup has occurred. You walk back into your office to find two kids and a dog rammed entirely into your desk chair, staring at you with an unblinking, vacant innocence, genuinely wondering if you’ve noticed them.

Nobody is immune to this domestic guerrilla warfare. Which got me wondering how far up the ladder this level of utter disrespect actually goes. Surely the ultra-wealthy in their fortified compounds, the tech bros, the bloodthirsty dictators of the world — men who control global markets and entire armies — cannot get through a single morning briefing without someone small, sticky, and entirely unreasonable appearing in the doorway to demand you watch a tedious Lego build video.

I tried several scenarios. None of them felt quite right.

Then a personal challenge I’d been sitting on for a while came back to me. My brain does this — it jumps around, hoards things, and then, if I’m lucky, connects them into something vaguely coherent. The challenge in question: to use the phrase “Jesus Christ” in a comic in a way that was entirely non-inflammatory. It occurred to me, quite suddenly, that I had found the one scenario in which the phrase was not only non-inflammatory — it was, technically, a statement of fact.

Naturally, I had to take it to the highest office in the land.

It turns out the highest authority in the universe has the same problem as the rest of us. Which is either deeply comforting or absolutely terrifying, depending on your theological disposition.

I love idioms. Things like “break a leg,” “the cat’s out of the bag,” or “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” start my brain firing. It’s almost like a challenge to construct the most ridiculous situation possible that would support these farcical phrases.

Take “bury the hatchet.” Officially, it means to make peace. To set aside a grievance and agree, in a spirit of goodwill, that whatever unpleasantness occurred between two parties is behind us.

And so I drew Carl. A man with the muscle mass of a mature bison and the cognitive processing speed of wet cardboard.

Carl understood none of this.

In his defense though, the chief was commonly know as “Barry the Hatchet.”

It was a hot summer’s day. I had just completed what I can only describe as a productive session with the swatter.

As I surveyed the results, my mind started to drift — as it tends to after you’ve removed several creatures from the mortal coil in quick succession. I found myself wondering how many different ways a fly could, in fact, meet its maker.

As you do.

I started sketching. Flies on the loo — I’d encourage you to think about that for a second. Two flies on a date, sitting in what I can only describe as a pungent restaurant on a steaming pile of poo. Having not been on a date for many years, I eventually settled on a family supper.

I drew it first in a normal kitchen. Fully stacked cupboards. Proper stove. Finished it and looked at it for a while. Something was missing. It wasn’t landing the way I thought it would. So I went back to the original idea — two flies on the steaming pile — and redrew.

If you’re a parent with children old enough to vocalise an opinion just as you’re serving supper, you know exactly how I got here.

That was it, really.

New panel every Tuesday. Subscribe below

Here’s the thing. I’m still a bit torn on the caption of the cartoon. Which one do you prefer? The last supper or the Tiny Tim one?

I've always liked vampires.

The mythology is well established. Transylvania, the whole tooth thing, the cape, sleeping in a coffin and the transformation — turning into a bat and flapping into the night. Handy.

Seems pretty cool but then I started thinking about what it’s like from the bat’s point of view.

Not the vampire becoming the bat — that direction has been covered — but the bat that is the vampire. Does the bat have any idea he turns into a vampire? So I honed in on that idea, personified the little fella, threw him into a therapy session and the rest just kind of drew itself.

Basic Instincts — a new panel every Tuesday.

This one started years ago with a specific image I couldn’t shake. A female praying mantis, stepping out from behind a bush, doing the Pulp Fiction dance. That slow, deliberate swagger — the one that says everything is completely fine and nothing bad is about to happen — as a young male approaches.

If you know anything about praying mantises, you know where this is going. The female eats the male’s head after mating. I have always found this underexplored comedically.

My first attempt at doing something with it was a school sex education setting. A mantis at the front of the class, chalk in hand, explaining the facts of life to a roomful of traumatised students. I tried a few versions. None of them worked. The joke kept collapsing — too much setup, not enough air in it. So I shelved it.

Then one day I just drew the two of them in bed and stopped overthinking it.

Then I added a trophy wall of previous males above the headboard — every one of them wearing the exact same look of disbelief. The males were not coming off well at this point.

Now, females are generally considered subtle communicators. This one was not. This one was doing the Pulp Fiction dance in broad daylight. Front and centre. A full production number. And still — nothing. Not a flicker.

So how do you make him even dafter? Detective’s cap on the lampshade.

This is what I love most about silly characters. Not that they’re daft — although they usually are — but that they’re committed. They walk straight into the situation with complete confidence, right up until the moment they don’t. The detective cap on the lampshade isn’t just a gag. It’s a full character arc in one prop.

Basic Instincts is always a snapshot of the moment just before it unfolds. The detective’s hat on the lampshade is that moment. Everything that came before it, and everything that’s about to happen next, is already in the picture.

Happy accidents. That’s mostly what this is.

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The original panel was simple. A dog saying “Hey Tony, pull my finger” — Tony already being sniffed from behind by a third dog who had no idea what was about to arrive.

​It worked. The joke was there. But something was missing.

The problem with a joke that only has one moving part is that it asks the reader to do all the work. You see the setup, you fill in the gap, you smile. It’s fine. But fine isn’t really the point.

​The thing I keep coming back to with Basic Instincts is this: I’m not trying to tell you what happened. I’m trying to catch something at the exact moment before it does.

​A snapshot. A situation on the very edge of unfolding — the split second before everything goes sideways — when the characters involved are still completely unaware of what’s coming. That tension, that gap between what they know and what we know — that’s where the funny lives.

​So I went back to Tony. And I asked myself: who is that dog at the back, and what does he think he’s doing?

​That’s when Henry arrived.

​Henry is a connoisseur. A professional. A dog of extraordinary nasal gifts who has spent years developing his ability to read a situation entirely through smell. He is, at this precise moment, deeply absorbed in his work.

​”I’m getting hints of pellets infused with lamb and something, I can’t quite...” Henry is not about to stop. Henry is about to inhale harder.

​He has no idea.

​And that’s the story. Not just a punchline. A character with a purpose, a sense of dignity, and approximately three seconds left before both are comprehensively destroyed.

​That’s what I’m going for every week. One panel. One moment. Just before it all goes wrong.