Meet the Mi-No, very distant relatives of our good friends the Mi-Go. More fungoid than crustacean, they wear their chitinous skeletons on the inside, like us meat folks (only our skeletons are not chitinous, more’s the pity). They live in a galaxy so distant from ours that even the Mi-Go have difficulties reaching it, a fact they regret deeply, for they dearly love their several times removed cousins. This here lot have just dropped in for a long visit, having just invented a truly clever transport system that will allow them (and the Mi-Go, of course), to consort on regular basis. The Mi-No have heard of our riotous groovy parties and poetry reading soirées and they are very keen to attend, being as they are, ever so fond of riotousness and poetry and other such lofty matters. The conveyance device operates, Mrs Mi-No tells me, on a system of randomly integrated singularities with a dash of exclusion zones. (It’s all Greek to me but I’m prepared to take her word for it, lest my head explodes with excessive information.) A clever, delightful people, these Mi-No. We all are utterly and hysterically chuffed, we are. The more the merrier is our motto.

Now, this one, I could claim I have no idea where she comes from but I’d be lying. But I won’t bore you with her genesis either. And I do like the textures, if I say so myself. She’s very well behaved, too, for a Gothette. She just sits by the window and sulks elegantly. I’ve seen worse!

This here furry lass is a bee of a different colour. She not only makes honey, she makes bubbles, look you! And in her spare time, she looks after orphaned wee worms, or gusanitos, as we call them. Her current charge takes the honey for granted, as one tends to do, but he’s most impressed by the bubbles. As am I.

Insect Queen. Here’s a little something to mark the autumn equinox and the start of that lovely, sensuous “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”: a pithy message from one of our Generic Queens. Mind you pay heed to her words, people; insects may not be the cuddliest of animals but without them we’d be all completely buggered. Have some respect!

Update 19/09/17 And here be a little something for myself, cobbled together out of an old Sonny Reader primitive drawing tool doodle and two characters stolen from the ineffable, peerless, semi-divine Hello Cthulhu comic strip. It makes me smile, what can I say, m’lud…

Tadpole&Teddy. When the little mafioso Worm of a few illustrations back showed up at a political gathering in a bowler hat he started a trend. Lately every other small creature that creeps, crawls, wiggles, wriggles, swings, sways and sashays in the Far Borders is sporting one. Panamas and Porkpies, Tops and Trilbies, Bowlers, Boaters, Borsalinos, Fedoras, Pamelas, Cloches, Bonnets and Bergí¨res, you name it, there goes a tiny organism wearing a classic headpiece -in many cases far too big for its bijou frame, but there’s fashion for you: inevitable, insidious and often ridiculous but always good for a laugh. I mean, if you’ve never seen a ladybird in a Cordobés or a jumping spider in a Ten-Gallon … well then, you haven’t half lived, that’s what I think. Minuto, the Deeply Red Teddy, thinks this fashion caper is all an evil plot. A malevolent conspiracy concocted and instigated by the Market Forceps to give the differently-sized a bad name. And we all know how the story goes from this point on, do we not? Once you’ve acquired a bad reputation it soon becomes abominable and therefore it’s easier to start screeching about mortal threats to Our Wonderful Way of Life and therefore talking sanctions and suggesting no-flight zones and proposing jackass boots on the ground and even hinting at nukular missages. Minuto is nobody’s fool.