Alex is a British cartoon strip by Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor. It first appeared in the short-lived London Daily News in 1987. It moved to The Independent later that year and then to The Daily Telegraph in 1992. A translated version was published in the German newspaper Financial Times Deutschland. It was also published translated into Dutch for some years in the main financial newspaper of the Netherlands, Het Financieele Dagblad (FD), around the turn of the century. The strip with its storylines-with-a-twist proved so popular that, in the course of its transfer to the Telegraph, it was preceded by a nationwide billboard campaign. The strip occurs in 'real-time', i.e. time passes and characters age and develop as in real life. Alex and Penny married in the strip's early days and had a son called Christopher, who grew up, went to school, had work experience and has now started college. Alex and Penny themselves are now middle-aged. Style and humour The humour in the strip derives from wordplay and twist endings related to Alex's world of yuppie values, Conservative politics, obsession with appearances, displays of wealth and schemes to stay one up in the world of international finance. A common theme is to contrast the old days of the traditional City of London (alcohol-fueled lunches, insider dealing, corporate jollies) with the modern American-influenced financial world (abstemiousness, compliance, corporate-speak). Peattie and Taylor are reputed to work closely with a variety of London financial contacts to ensure that their strips accurately reflect the recent scandals and rumours which pass around the City. Much gossip has circulated as to the likely inspiration for some of the characters. A storyline in March 2009 had one of Alex's old colleagues leave the city to become a teacher, coinciding with a British government plan to ease the amount of time spent on teacher training and encouraging "fantastic mathematicians... who would have once perhaps gone into the City but now actually might be more interested in a career in teaching". The most common kind of joke features a conversation between the characters, where in the final frame a twist ending becomes apparent – the context of the conversation was not what the reader had supposed, usually reflecting on the protagonists' materialistic values and priorities. For instance, in a restaurant, an embarrassed Alex apologises to the maître d' after his dinner guest answers a call on his