11/11/2025

`Gift Books by Marcus Berkmann

Sad farewell of the year is “The Last of Alex 2025” (Masterley, £20) by Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor. As you will surely know, Peattie and Taylor were sacked earlier this year by the Daily Telegraph after several thousand years producing their daily strip and this is a final round-up of the strips published, plus some new material not previously seen even by Peattie and Taylor’s close relatives. To the end the strip remained very funny, enlivened by recent bursts of colour and some patently ridiculous plots that sometime only satirised the City marginally. Alex’s last adventure revealed that his whole existence had been just a computer-generated illusion, which I think any of us could have told him. The book’s unpublished strips also chart the future lives of the cartoon’s other characters (Penny, Clive, Cyrus, Vince and others long unseen) after Alex’s disappearance. If you can’t find it in a bookshop you can buy it from their website, www.alexcartoon.com. I now have more than 30 of these Alex annuals in a box in my loft, and I have just checked that there’s room for one more. But it’s a sad day indeed for one of the best and consistently funniest cartoon strips of the past 35 years.