The Whoopee! years - It's Cheeky (second run)

The title ‘It’s Cheeky’ was used for two series of strips starring the toothy funster following Cheeky Weekly’s absorption into Whoopee! The first, five-week run served to introduce Cheeky and pals to those Whoopee! readers who had not previously made their acquaintance (although some veterans among the Whoopee! audience at the time of the Cheeky merge in early 1980 may have remembered the appearance of a Cheeky Weekly mini-comic in their favourite title back in 1978).

Following the conclusion of the initial It’s Cheeky run, our toothy pal’s comic vehicles underwent a series of format and title changes, before the second It’s Cheeky run began in Whoopee! dated 30 January 1982, a week after his Cheeky’s Week strip came to a conclusion.

Whereas the first It’s Cheeky run consisted of 4 pages per week, the second outing was limited to a single page in each edition. We can only conclude that our grinning pal’s popularity was waning somewhat by this stage in his career.

The first two episodes of the revived run of It’s Cheeky commenced with the titular tittermeister seated at his tripe-writer, a device (in more than one sense of the word) that was used to introduce all but 4 instalments of his predecessor feature Cheeky’s Week. Following his abandonment of the tripe-writer, Cheeky made his introductory remarks directly to the audience (he probably got fed up with all that typing).

Whoopee! 30 January 1982
Art: Frank McDiarmid, as is all the art below

The episode structure of this new run diverged a little from previous Cheeky strips in that there was a plot each week rather than a series of unrelated gags, and a number of the stories concerned Cheeky's home life with his mum and dad. The male contingent of the Cheeky household seemed to have something of an adversarial relationship with Mum.

The first four strips in the second run of It's Cheeky used the same title design as seen during the initial run, but as from episode five of run 2, a new design was introduced which reminds me of those old cinema signs where letters were attached to rails, sometimes rather wonkily, to spell out the title of each week's film.

Snail has a grievance

This run of It's Cheeky concluded in the issue dated 15 May 1982, the revival appearing for a total of 16 weeks. Frank McDiarmid drew all the episodes. For the first 13 weeks the strip was located on page 20, thereafter slipping back to page 24 for one issue before spending its last 2 weeks further demoted to page 26.

The toothy funster's somewhat restless Whoopee! sojourn didn't end there, however, and I'll be examining his subsequent outings soon.

In former times Cheeky would have enjoyed
a gag with each of his pals.
Snail's still got the hump.