Horror Bags ad

Paul from the excellent Cobwebbed Room blog has enquired about this ad which appeared in Cheeky Weekly dated 08 July 1978, so I thought I'd post it rather than describe it - you're welcome to use it on your blog, Paul, if it's one that you haven't already featured.

Cheeky Weekly's lost 23 December 1978 issue - Reconstructed! (part 5)

Element	Eventually published in	Published as	Notes
Thursday	Cheeky Weekly 22 December 1979	Thursday	Title panel replaced. Christmas card story continues despite change in artist. Final panel is intro to Skateboard Squad, but that strip finished in May 1979, a couple of weeks before the team re-appeared under their new title, Speed Squad. Text has therefore been altered (Why, Dad, Why? followed Thursday in the 22 December 1979 issue - Speed Squad appeared 8 pages later). Foot of page resized.

Art: Mike Lacey

Cheeky Weekly's lost 23 December 1978 issue - Reconstructed! Part 6

Cheeky Weekly's lost 23 December 1978 issue - Reconstructed! (part 4)

Element	Eventually published in	Published as	Notes
Wednesday	Cheeky Weekly 22 December 1979	Wednesday	Another cut-and-pasted head on new body replaces the title panel. Christmas card storyline continues. Final panel is clearly an intro to The Mystery Comic, but that came to an end in the 30 June 1979 issue, so the text has been changed to make it a Christmas card reference. Clever! In the 22 December 1979 issue, Mustapha Million followed Wednesday. Foot of page resized.

Art: Frank McDiarmid

Element	Eventually published in	Published as	Notes
Tub	Cheeky Annual 1980, page 57	Tub	This was the first of 2 Tub strips in the 1980 Cheeky Annual (the other, more Christmassy tale can be seen here). Both were sourced from material prepared for the missing December 1978 issues. I would guess that this strip was drawn for the abandoned 23 December 1978 pre-Christmas issue, as it has an icy/snowy setting. Note how the Mystery Comic's sci-fi cover background has been cut down to allow the Tub strip to be blown up to fill the width of the annual page - now why didn't they do the same for Tub's episode on page 120 of the annual, seen in the link above, which is left floundering at the centre? Thanks to the scanner of this annual page.

UPDATE 26 November 2012:

Element	Eventually published in	Published as	Notes
Disaster Des	Cheeky Weekly 20 January 1979	Disaster Des	This page, one of the two occasions on which Disaster Des occupied the Mystery Comic's cover, appears to include a strip from which Christmas references have been removed (as was the case with Elephant On The Run and Skateboard Squad in the 17 February 1979 Cheeky Weekly, and Calculator Kid in the same 20 January 1979 issue as this Des story). I suspect that Des's speech balloon in panel 2 on the second row originally read "I thought we were going to be home by Christmas, Cap'n!", and that in the following panel he originally said "It's not going to be much of a Christmas with only us two on board". In the final panel, it looks as though the Captain's balloon has been altered, probably the words "some fun" replaced "a party". I'd guess Des's closing balloon originally read "It isn't everyone who gets his own private Christmas circus!" I have assumed that this strip was originally intended for Cheeky Weekly's 23 December 1978 issue, but it's possible that the Disaster Des strip that was eventually printed in the 1980 Cheeky Annual (as seen in this post) was the one slated for the pre-Christmas issue, and this episode was intended for the Christmas issue.

Art: Mike Lacey

Cheeky Weekly's lost 23 December 1978 issue - Reconstructed! Part 5

Cheeky Weekly's lost 23 December 1978 issue - Reconstructed! (part 3)

Element	Eventually published in	Published as	Notes
Tuesday	Cheeky Weekly 22 December 1979	Tuesday	A rather peculiar agglomeration of cut-and-pasted Cheeky head with newly-drawn body replaces the title panel. Christmas card storyline continues. Doodle Doug's presence in the final panel indicates that Paddywack would have followed had the page been published in December 1978, but the text has been altered because the Doodle Doug intros to the Paddywack strips ceased as of the 07 July 1979 comic. In the 22 December 1979 issue, Paddywack appeared 6 pages earlier than the Tuesday page, which was followed by a Soggy the Sea Monster reprint. The art at the foot of the page has been resized to compensate for the removal of the What Did YOU Do Today? diary section.

Cheeky Weekly's lost 23 December 1978 issue - Reconstructed! Part 4

Cheeky Weekly's lost 23 December 1978 issue - Reconstructed! (part 2)

Element	Eventually published in	Published as	Notes
Monday	Cheeky Weekly 22 December 1979	Monday	Christmas card storyline continues. In December 1978 the introductory page of each daily Cheeky feature had a Cheeky's Week… title panel. These panels ceased to appear as from July 1979. This page in the 22 December 1979 comic has clearly had the title panel removed and replaced with a cut-and-paste Cheeky and some text in a different style to the rest of the page. Calculator Kid would have evidently followed in December 1978, but Cheeky's dialogue has been amended because CK had actually appeared on the preceding page in the 22 December 1979 issue. The artwork at the foot of the page has been resized because the 'What did YOU do today? diary section, which was also present in December 1978, but not in December 1979, has been removed. Disco Kid's badge references a character from TV series Roots, which was first shown on the BBC on 08 April 1977. See below for what I believe was the Calculator Kid strip that would have followed in the lost 23 December 1978 issue.

Art: Frank McDiarmid

Element	Eventually published in	Published as	Notes
Calculator Kid	Cheeky Weekly 20 January 1979	Calculator Kid	This was one of four strips that I suspect were originally intended for the lost 23 or 30 December 1978 issues, but were converted into non-festive-season stories (the other conversions being the Disaster Des strip that eventually appeared in the same 20 January 1979 issue as this CK story, and Elephant On The Run and Skateboard Squad published in Cheeky Weekly dated 17 February 1979 ). It would be my guess that this story originally saw Charlie setting out to buy Christmas presents - note the snow, suspiciously festive wrapping paper on Charlie's presents and what look like Christmas decorations inside the store. If I'm correct, the original version of the story was set prior to December 25th, so it's likely that it was intended for the 23 December 1978 issue (I suspect the Calculator Kid strip that eventually appeared on page 114 of the 1980 Cheeky Annual was originally intended for the 30 December 1978 issue). Update 08 October 2020 - see Stephen Archer's interesting observations in the comments section below. It may be that the Cheeky Weekly editor decided that the Christmas story conversions were not entirely successful, and as a consequence the rest of the non-Cheeky strips originally created for the 23 and 30 December 1978 issues were held over for use later in the year.

Cheeky Weekly's lost 23 December 1978 issue - Reconstructed!  Part 3

Cheeky Weekly's lost 23 December 1978 issue - Reconstructed!

As discussed here, Cheeky Weekly failed to be published for 3 weeks in December 1978 due to an industrial dispute. The missing issues were those that would have been dated 16, 23 and 30 December 1978.

Material for Cheeky Weekly was clearly prepared some weeks in advance of the publication date, so it's a safe bet that the pages scheduled to appear in these lost issues had been delivered to the Cheeky Weekly editor before the industrial action brought publication to a temporary halt. Since two of the lost issues had a Christmas theme (there were two Christmas-themed Cheeky Weeklies in 1977; 24 December's pre-Christmas issue and 31 December's full-blown Christmas issue), these pages could not really be used (at least not without modification - of which more later) until the following festive season, and that is indeed what happened with the Cheeky's Week material.

From the 30 September 1978 issue to that dated 30 June 1979, the Cheeky's Week pages included an introductory title panel, and an area at the foot of some pages entitled 'What did YOU do today?' which gave readers the space to record a brief diary entry. Since a number of the Cheeky pages prepared for the Christmas 1978 issues included these elements, which would have to be removed in preparing the artwork for its eventual use at the end of 1979, it's possible to identify those pages which were salted away by a canny Cheeky Weekly editor for use in the following year's festive editions.

I'm embarking on a series of posts in which I will identify those pages that would have appeared in 1978's Christmas issues had Cheeky Weekly not become briefly embroiled in the volatile industrial relations of the late 70s.

Cheeky Weekly's lost 23 December 1978 issue

Element	Eventually published in	Published as	Notes
Sunday	Cheeky Weekly 22 December 1979	Sunday	Christmas card storyline begins. Different lettering style in Cheeky's speech balloon in the final panel suggests his original comments have been altered - in the original version he would have introduced 6 Million Dollar Gran, whose strip would commence on the following page. By the end of 1979, Gran had been moved to the rear of the comic. In the 22 December 1979 issue, Sunday was followed by Calculator Kid.

Art: Frank McDiarmid

Cheeky Weekly's lost 23 December 1978 issue - Reconstructed! Part 2

The missing issues

By the end of 1978, the weary British public were well acquainted with the effects of industrial action. The 70s had seen governments attempting to control inflation (which had rocketed to a peak of 26.9% in 1975) by means of pay limits, a measure that was, of course, anathema to the trade unions. This confrontational scenario resulted in a series of strikes, power cuts, shortages of basic commodities and reduced working hours for many - even those not actually on strike.

As 1978 ground to its drear conclusion, Britain entered a particularly acute period of industrial strife, which came to be known as The Winter of Discontent. IPC, publishers of Cheeky Weekly, had already suffered the effects of industrial disputes earlier in the decade, and there were indications that trouble was again brewing when Cheeky Weeky dated 02 December 1978 was reduced from the usual 32 pages to 27. No reason for the page reduction was given in that issue, but most readers would have guessed that some sort of strike or work to rule was the cause. This thread on the Comics UK forum suggests that the majority of the disputes that affected IPC's output in the 70s were at the printers rather than at IPC itself.

The following week's issue was also truncated, although gaining an extra page on the previous week to make it only four pages shorter than normal.

Whatever the dispute that had caused the reduced issues, it must have worsened, as no Cheeky Weekly appeared for the following 3 weeks.

I don't remember where in London I was working at the time, but for a number of years I would visit newsagents near my various places of work during my lunch break on the day my comics of choice were published. I would then smuggle my purchases back into the office under my coat, as I didn't want my colleagues to know I was a comic reader. I don't recall asking the newsagent why there was no Cheeky Weekly during the period in question - I think I just assumed it hadn't appeared due to a strike or somesuch, but checked a couple of other newsagents, just to be sure.

We can be sure that no issues were published with cover dates 16, 23 and 30 December 1978 because the episode of Mystery Boy featured in the first issue after the break (dated 06 January 1979) continues directly from that in the 09 December 1978 issue in which Sandy was abducted by two German airmen. Also, there was a message across the top of page 2 of the 06 January 1979 issue (which was a full 32 pages) reading "Sorry we've been away - glad to be back for the new year, pals!"

It was particularly frustrating that one of the lost comics was what would have been the Christmas 1978 issue. However, I believe that most if not all of the material prepared for that issue was eventually used in one form or another - see these posts.