Cheeky Weekly Star Guests in Whoopee! (part 4)

Week 8 of IPC's 1979 Star Guest promotion saw Elephant on the Run chosen as Cheeky Weekly's ambassador to Whoopee! The strip certainly deserved a Star Guest appearance, as it was among Cheeky Weekly's stand-out features. However, this particular episode doesn't really do the feature justice, as there's little of the daft humour that was so evident in its run in the toothy funster's comic. This weakness probably results from the need to restrict the story to a single page. EOTR had benefited from 2-page escapades in Cheeky Weekly up to the date of this Star Guest, whereas Star Guests were, as far as I'm aware, always single pages.

Whoopee! 19 May 1979
Art: Regular EOTR artist Robert Nixon
Many thanks to Irmantas for this scan

Readers of the above strip who were hitherto unaware of  Elephant and his predicament may have felt the introductory caption was somewhat perfunctory, but regular followers of EOTR had little more insight into the reasons behind the pachyderm protagonist's plight.

This Star Guest was a new page and never appeared in Cheeky Weekly.

Whoopee! readers whose interest was piqued enough by this set to motivate them to spend 9p of their precious pocket money for the same week's issue of Cheeky Weekly would have been disappointed to find Elephant and The Man In The Plastic Mac were absent from the then-current edition of our grinning pal's title (not the first time this basic error occurred with the Cheeky Weekly Star Guests – see also the promotional outings of Disaster Des and Skateboard Squad). However, EOTR resumed in Cheeky Weekly dated 26 May 1979 and clocked up appearances in a further 34 issues before being pursued into the annals of comic history (except for appearances in the Cheeky Holiday Special 1980 and Cheeky Annual 1981) when the toothy funster's comic was wound up.