The Mike Lacey and Jimmy Hansen Crisis! Part 2

I retrieved the issue of Whizzer and Chips with the same cover date as the first Cheeky Weekly. My plan is to identify (to the best of my ability) any work by Mike Lacey in that issue of W&C, then compare it with the first Skateboard Squad strip in Cheeky Weekly. I'm working on the assumption that Jimmy Hansen didn't begin providing artwork for IPC product until some years later.

First up in the potential-Mike-Lacey stakes is Sid's Snake. To me this seems to be classic Mike Lacey (even though the printing quality is rather rough).

The next contender is Shiner. The style is a bit different to the work on Sid (which has a kind of 'gentler', less extreme look about it, but of course there's not a lot of action in Sid's story), but assuming this was before the Jimmy Hansen era, I reckon it is Mike Lacey. The 'two parallel line legs' with little evidence of knees is a key indicator of Mike's work for me.

The final strip from this issue which has the hallmarks of Mr Lacey (to my eyes, anyway) is this Pete's Pockets. The style is closer to that evident on Shiner than the Sid artwork. However, I suspect this may be a reprint from some years earlier which could account for the slight difference in rendition. The legs, although somewhat obscured by Wellingtons, certainly seem to be typical of Mike. Thus my decision is that this is by Mike.

Now let's compare the work above with the first Skateboard Squad strip...

I don't know about you, but I can see a few Lacey legs in there. The style seems pretty close to that evident in Shiner above, so I'm relatively certain now that this Skateboard Squad is by Mike. Maybe I won't need to reassign the artwork credits after all. More investigations coming soon.

UPDATE - I was just glancing at some covers as I put the W&Cs away when I noticed this Sid story from the previous issue to that shown above. I believe this is by Mike, but the legs are more contoured than his Shiner and Pete legs. Did Mike, like Tom Paterson, concurrently use different styles of drawing for certain strips?