Every Monday we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers. This week’s offering is from 1988.

When we decided to ask our readers to nominate their favourite Alex cartoons for this feature, we thought it might provoke some unusual and interesting choices. After all, we’ve produced 8,761 Alex strips over the years, so there’s a wide range of choice there. But this one we didn’t see coming. Tim Eddis has chosen a cartoon which wasn’t even one of our strips, but a filler illustration which appeared in our second book “The Unabashed Alex” back in 1988. Oh well, the more the merrier.

This cartoon has a nice reversal of the concepts of being in and out as heard on standard answerphone messages. Alex clearly had a high sense of his own importance to worry that he might miss some vital business calls while he was at the crease. He was also probably arrogant enough to assume that he’d make at least a century and thus would be spending a long time away from his phone.

This is one of those cartoons that people under the age of about thirty might struggle to understand. Not only is the mobile phone unrecognisably huge (to the modern eye), but it is physically attached to a strange device called an answerphone (aka ansafone). These antiquated contraptions actually recorded on a cassette tape (though we hear that cassettes are now part of retro fashion among Gen Z).

Back in the late 1980s there wasn’t even an agreed name for the bulky early mobile phones that were beginning to appear. Although old people grumbled about them being a nuisance in public places and the few Yuppie bankers who owned them loved showing them off, no one had settled on a name for this joint object of vilification and pride. In early Alex cartoons they were variously referred to as “portable telephones” and “roamaphones”. By the time British society arrived at a consensus that they should be called “mobile phones” they had become commonplace and lost all their appeal as a status symbol.

We’re not sure it was even possible to wire an 80s-style mobile phone to a physical answerphone, but the answerphone needed to be seen for the joke to be comprehensible. Answerphones were of course long ago superseded by digital voicemail. And even that isn’t used anymore, apart from by old people. What would be the point? We’re all online 24/7 these days. The very concept that being out would make you uncontactable makes little sense any more. This progressive digitalisation of the world makes it increasingly uncartoonable. Take AI, for example, which is now ubiquitous in our lives: how do you represent that visually in a cartoon? Perhaps that’s why there are so few young people wanting to become cartoonists these days.

If you’ve got any suggestions for a favourite cartoon for future inclusion please email us. And do tell us if there’s a particular reason why it appealed to you.