The Mike Lacey and Jimmy Hansen Crisis! Part 5

Since raising the thorny issue of the similarity of Mike Lacey and Jimmy Hansen's drawing styles I have been continuing my reading of the post-Whoopee-merge issues of Whizzer and Chips, to which both artists contributed, along the way trying to train my eye to recognise any peculiarities of illustration by which the two styles may be differentiated. I have also done a bit of internet searching for any biographical detail about Jimmy, in the hope of discovering the date of his earliest published comic work, but sadly there seems to be practically no available information. Confusingly this site refers to him as Jim Hanson which doesn't help.

Anyway, back to the different art styles - I'd say Jimmy's character work often displays particularly exaggerated reactions, regularly veering into the grotesque, with Mike having a less extreme approach of depicting shock, fear, delight etc. which rarely extends to the ugly end of the spectrum (well, maybe a bit grotesque in the case of Ursula!).

While preparing a future post looking at the 15 September 1979 issue of Cheeky Weekly I was struck by the non-Mike-Laceyness of this page (which I had previously attributed to Mike)...

The above page exhibits some of the extremes that I have now come to associate with Jimmy. Interestingly, that same issue also contains Cheeky pages that to me seem to be drawn Mike, such as this...

...the depictions of Cheeky also differ quite considerably between the two pages.

So, in the absence of any information as to Jimmy's earliest published work, I'm going to assign the Monday page above (and the other pages in the same issue exhibiting the same style) to Jimmy. I will at some point have to go through all the Cheeky Weekly work I have attributed to Mike and re-assess it based on the comparative styles above. It may be that the above is the first 'Jimmy' page that featured in Cheeky Weekly - won't know until that re-evaluation is complete.