Cheeky Weekly Star Guests in Whizzer and Chips (part 9)

Week 17 of IPC's 1979 Star Guest promotion (in participating comics cover-dated 21 July 1979) means attention turns once again to Whizzer and Chips. In fact this is the 9^th and final Cheeky Weekly Star Guest visit to the famous 'two comics in one', as we have reached the promotion's penultimate week and Whoopee will be hosting the concluding Cheeky Weekly Star Guest.

So which strip has been chosen to make the final promotional sortie into Whizz-kid and Chip-ite territory?

Whizzer and Chips 21 July 1979
Art: Robert MacGillivray

Any long-time Whizzer and Chips readers will immediately recognise this strip as a rehash of The Double Deckers, who graced W&C's pages from 1971 – 1972. Reprints, altered and retitled somewhat unimaginatively The Gang, commenced in Cheeky Weekly just 2 weeks ago, in the issue dated 07 July 1979.

All the Double Deckers stories I have seen from the original run were 2-pagers and this, together with the fact that the above strip commences with our heroes in the midst of an arboreal predicament, suggests that this may just be the second page of what was originally a double-page spread. UPDATE August 2022 - Stephen Archer's research on the original run of The Double Deckers has revealed that my speculation was correct and the artwork above was excised from the Deckers' 2-page adventure originally printed in Whizzer and Chips dated 22 January 1972. That first page can be seen here.

Given that the strip originated in Whizzer and Chips it's a bit of an odd Star Guest choice. Admittedly there are unlikely to be many readers still taking the comic who were reading it 7 years ago when the first Double Deckers series ended and would recognise this as a W&C cast-off. But surely Star Guest should showcase the best/most popular features that Cheeky Weekly has to offer, and clearly there has not been sufficient time to collect any reader feedback on the popularity of the strip in the 2 weeks since The Gang first appeared.

To select an old and hacked-about story from an untried (in its altered form) strip just adds to my impression that IPC management had little enthusiasm for Cheeky Weekly by this stage, and were beginning to run the comic down as the inevitable merge loomed. 

The message at the bottom of the page wasn't wrong as The Gang did indeed appear in Cheeky Weekly every week from their debut in the 07 July 1979 comic until the final edition, meaning any readers adopting the toothy funster's title as of the concurrent issue would have 'enjoyed' 29 episodes of erstwhile Double Decker doings, as well as a further 2 each in the Cheeky Holiday Special published in 1980 and the same year's Cheeky Annual 1981.