Over the weeks there were many anonymous
stooges who shared a joke with Cheeky and were never seen again.
Certain of these ephemeral members of the Cheeky cast, however, were
introduced and named in such a way that one expected them to become regular
characters. This series of posts examines those 'one-off'
appearances.
As Cheeky emerged from another trip in the time-travelling phone box in Cheeky Weekly dated 26 August 1978, he encountered Mr Haddock's 'new assistant' Fish-Face ...
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| Art: Mike Lacey |
Fish-Face never returned to the pages of Cheeky Weekly, although another, un-named (and thus not qualifying for a one-off post of his own) fishmonger's assistant made a single appearance in the comic dated 04 November 1978.
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| Mike Lacey again |
It sounds very fishy to me!
ReplyDeleteWe'll just have to face it.
DeleteHmmm... Mr Haddock's official first appearance was the end of July 1978. Fish Face only appeared the following month. Could it be that the script was originally for Mr Haddock, but Mike Lacey didn't know what the character looked like, so changed it to an assistant instead...? How much freedom did the artists have to change the scripts? And who wrote the scripts anyway?
ReplyDelete(Sorry for not including any fish jokes in that comment, but I didn't think it was the right plaice for them!)
You've cod to be kidding (ahem, sorry). Good thinking about Mike not having a visual reference for Mr Haddock at the time he drew the panel in question - Mike first drew Haddock in the issue dated 07 October 1978, so you're probably right. In this interview, Frank McDiarmid explains that the Cheeky scriptwriter, who was sometimes referred to within the strips as Willie Cook, was in fact Gordon Cook, and that Frank was given license to add a lot of his own stuff.
DeleteThanks for that link. Great interview.
ReplyDelete