Next up is Cheeky himself, now in somewhat reduced circumstances. Once he was the star of his own comic, and had begun his Whoopee! run with 5 pages a week, but Christmas '81 finds our grinning pal confined to a 2-page centre spread, and even then he has to share it with strips featuring his slimy sidekick and a bearded, jolly fellow who gets very busy at the end of December. Nevertheless Frank McDiarmid packs the space with a welter of Yuletide gags, as Cheeky meets a good number of his Krazy Town pals. Sadly there's no slap-up feed but the feature concludes with a nice sentiment courtesy of the man with the sleigh and reindeer.
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| Whoopee! 26 December 1981 Art: Frank McDiarmid |
More from Whoopee! at Christmas '81 soon,
you can tell Frank needed 4 pages to make this work at least..
ReplyDeletenice to see Lily pop!
Yes, it's a bit sad to see Cheeky reduced to 2 pages. Maybe a double page spread showing Cheeky's Christmas party with a load of his pals would have been better, but the editor obviously decided to keep the multi-strip format of Cheeky's Week/Tee-Hee TV/Cheeky's Snail/Cheeky's Pal that had been in place in Whoopee! since the 12 September 1981 issue. Frank does a good job nonetheless.
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