Whoopee! and Cheeky - the first combined issue; 09 February 1980

We learn from the cover of the first Whoopee! and Cheeky that our toothy pal and his ex-Cheeky Weekly co-survivors will be ensconced in a 16 page comic-within-comic in the centre of the host title, a rather unusual way of absorbing one comic into another (the customary fate of an underperforming title was its 'merge' into a more successful comic). Most 'merges' resulted in the features from the failed comic being interspersed among the pages of the host title. Cheeky Weekly wasn't so much merged into Whoopee!, rather the toothy funster's title was embraced by the elder comic.

Whizzer and Chips had most famously employed the two-comics-in-one format since 1969, but the idea had also been used in Shiver and Shake, and of course Cheeky Weekly itself adopted the concept during the period in which the Mystery Comic occupied its centre pages (although adding an additional metatextual spin not present in the above examples by having the Mystery Comic being a title read by the Cheeky Weekly characters).

Since the focus of this blog is on Cheeky and his pals, I'll home straight in on that very first Cheeky section. On the section's front page, our toothy pal is, unusually, sporting a blue and black jumper instead of his familiar red and black apparel (the new sweater was probably given to him by the Whoopee! editor as a bit of a sweetener). This is another use of an image that I refer to as the 'standard Cheeky face' which was first seen in the debut issue of Cheeky Weekly and on several subsequent occasions. The office cleaner has clearly been complaining about having to dust the boxes of  Friend of Cheeky badges left in the corner of what was the Cheeky Weekly office. Snail makes his presence felt, as he did on the Whoopee! cover.

The Curtain rises on Stage School with a brief résumé of the strip's premise for the benefit of Whoopee! readers, before the cravat-wearing showbiz teacher (who was rarely seen in Cheeky Weekly) sets a tough exam assignment. The title panel that appeared in the last few months of the strip's Cheeky Weekly run has been retained.

Art: Robert Nixon

Stage School's 2-pager is followed by a page carrying the details of the proper-front-page-announced competition to win a Friscodisco battery-powered record player.



Erstwhile Cheeky Weekly readers may be a bit surprised to see a selection of Paddywack gags over the page, as the bumbling buffoon wasn't included among the band of characters shown to be transferring to their new home in last week's final issue of our grinning pal's comic. Readers are still being invited to submit their Paddywack gags (the editor clearly hoping to mine a previously-untapped source of gags in the shape of Whoopee! readers who, because the dithering dolt wasn't included in the Cheeky mini comic that appeared in their funny paper, were hitherto unaware that such a thing as a 'Paddywack type joke' even existed), although the cash reward for successful contributors has been reduced from Cheeky Weekly's £2 to a single quid BUT with a bonus Whoopee! Cushion prize which I'm sure is worth a pound of anyone's money.

Art: Jack Clayton

Next up is 6 Million Dollar Gran, or rather $6000,000 Gran as she has now been styled. Pauline Potts informs Whoopee! readers that the titular OAP is a 'bionic robot granny'. Well, at least this oxymoronic statement  does acknowledge Gran's robotic origin.

Art: Ian Knox

The next 2 pages of Cheeky's section are devoted to the first instalment of the cut-out Fib card game, IPC, as ever, never missing an opportunity to encourage readers to attack their comics with scissors. The cards feature characters from the newly-combined comic, so Cheeky, Mustapha Million, Snail, Gran and Calculator Kid rub shoulders with the likes of Whoopee! stalwarts Frankie Stein and Lolly Pop. Readers excising the game from within the Cheeky section would be losing the second of Gran's pages and the first of Cheeky's.

Cheeky, seemingly unaware that he risks being glued to a cornflake packet then sliced into pieces, does the introductions in his whopping 4-page segment, titled It's Cheeky!. Well, obviously 4 pages is a bit of a comedown compared to the coverage he had in Cheeky Weekly, but it's a good number of pages to be allocated post-merge (the opinions of long-time Whoopee! readers who find their favourite strips jettisoned to make way for what they may well consider to be 'all this Cheeky rubbish' would no doubt differ). The monochrome printing means we can't tell whether the toothy funster is wearing his new blue/black jumper. Mike Lacey does his usual superb job, but it's a pity Frank McDiarmid wasn't on hand to furnish the inaugural artwork for Cheeky's Whoopee! era. I suspect Frank either took a well-deserved break for a week, or was busy building up a stock of Cheeky strips for future use.

Art: Mike Lacey

Like Gran, Mustapha has undergone a title revision which now reads Mu$tapha Mi££i(coin image)n - he was previously titled Mustapha Mi££ion although I rarely referred to him as such. Joe McCaffrey clearly used Reg Parlett's artwork on the first Mustapha episode as a reference for the 3-panel back-story.

Rounding off the Cheeky section is Calculator Kid. It's remarkably fortunate for Whoopee! readers that just as the story starts, Charlie and Calc encounter a newcomer to the area (modelling rather alarming, baggy tartan trews), giving young Master Counter and his battery-powered buddy the opportunity to explain the strip's set-up. Whereas in Cheeky Weekly the feature had a title panel located at the left hand side of the first row of pictures, Charlie and Calc now have a banner-style title, although using the same image as before.

Art: Terry Bave

Long-time readers of the host title may have already been aware of Cheeky, Gran and Mustapha if they had read the aforementioned Cheeky mini comic that appeared in their 08 July 1978 edition.

Other than the '2 Famous Comics in One' banner on Whoopee!'s front page and the Cheeky/Posh Claude gag, there is no mention of the 'merge' in this week's issue - not even a 'welcome to our new readers'-type message on the letters page (although some of the strips in the Whoopee! section do include introductory explanations for new readers).

There is, however, this ominous announcement...

Goodbye Whoopee (and Gran and Paddywack).

Art: Tom Paterson

By the late 1970s comic publishers had largely abandoned the custom of announcing a title's demise with a front-cover banner reading 'Great news inside, pals!'. Although a merging of two comics was inevitably given a positive spin, more subtle methods were employed on the front page to prepare readers for the imminent termination of their funny paper.

Thus readers of the 30 March 1985 issue of Whoopee could have been forgiven for missing the significance of Sweeny Toddler's 'Me's got to fly – tell you all about it inside' front page message, tying in as it did with the kite element of that week's Sweeny story. However, the cold facts were revealed on the centre pages – after a respectable 11 year presence on the newsagents' shelves Whoopee, which had lost its exclamation mark when it absorbed Wow! in 1983, had reached the end of its run and would be merged into Whizzer and Chips the following week.

Whoopee 30 March 1985

At this point it was 5 years since Cheeky Weekly had failed and been merged into Whoopee. Surprisingly, despite the subsequent incorporation of Wow! into Whoopee, the majority of the strips to transfer from the toothy funster's comic had survived to Whoopee's final issue in one form or another.

Let's have a look at their pages from this final issue of Whoopee...

Stage School, something of a latecomer to Cheeky Weekly where it commenced in July 1979, was one of the strips fortunate to make the transition to Whoopee and it continued, without lapsing into reprint, to feature on 2 pages every week up to the final issue...

Art: Robert Nixon

Although Stage School did appear in Whizzer and Chips, it can't really be said that the feature survived the second merge, as the strip made just two appearances, in the 20 April 1985 and 13 July 1985 issues of Whizzer and Chips including Whoopee, both in the Chips section.

6 Million Dollar Gran had undergone a number of alterations since being welcomed into Whoopee. The first change was the subtle amendment of the strip's title from 6 Million Dollar Gran to $6000,000 Dollar Gran as of her first Whoopee appearance. The first major overhaul came when the synthetic senior citizen was hired as nanny to a group of kids and the strip was renamed Robot Granny. The second big change saw Gran became leader of a group of pensioners when the strip was retitled Gran's Gang, from which point her robotic nature was no longer apparent, and her weekly adventures were reduced to a single page.

Art: Ian Knox

Gran was another casualty of the merger.

Mustapha Million continued to appear until the final Whoopee, although he had reverted to reprints of his Cheeky Weekly exploits as of April 1984. On occasion the reprints were edited down from two pages to a single page. At first these reprints featured retouched speech balloons, squared off to match the Whoopee style, but later these alterations were dropped, as can be seen from this reprint in Whoopee's final issue...

Art: Reg Parlett
Reprint from Cheeky Weekly dated 03 June 1978

Mustapha's strips in Whizzer and Chips commenced with a page containing a single row of new art recounting how he came by his wealth, underneath which was a cut-down reprint of his adventure from Cheeky Weekly dated 03 February 1979. The reprints continued until new adventures of the middle-eastern moneybags began in February 1986, drawn by Robert Nixon before artwork duties were handed over to Barry Glennard and then Frank McDiarmid.

Calculator Kid had appeared throughout Whoopee's post-Cheeky-merge run, and had generated a spin-off, Calculator Corner (although absent from the final Whoopee).

Art: Terry Bave

In the case of Charlie Counter and his silicon-chipped sidekick, there is no conclusion to his adventures in the final Whoopee, as he survived the merge and continued to appear in Whizzer and Chips, as did Calculator Corner for a while. Eventually, however, Calculator Kid lapsed into reprints of his Cheeky Weekly adventures before the strip was dropped.

Paddywack: Jack Clayton
Bleep!: Jim Barker
Cheeky: Frank McDiarmid
Here Is The News: Ed McHenry

Paddywack was by this time reduced to a single row of panels on Whoopee's Quick Strips page, as was Cheeky, whose circumstances had been considerably reduced since he featured on four pages per week in his own comic section immediately after Cheeky Weekly merged into Whoopee. Paddywack didn't survive the merge into Whizzer and Chips. Cheeky didn't survive as a solo strip, but he continued to appear in Whizzer and Chips as a member of The Krazy Gang, who had been appearing there since Krazy merged into it way back in April 1978.

In addition to the strips above, there were additional appearances by ex-Cheeky Weekly characters in the final Whoopee...

Stage School Teacher  appears
on the Comic Turns page

Art: J Edward Oliver

In an attempt to lure any loyal Whoopee readers reluctant to make the transition to Whizzer and Chips, the final Whoopee contained the first part of a competition that would continue in W&C the following week.

So how were the readers of Whizzer and Chips informed of the imminent arrival of the Whoopee refugees? Well, there wasn't anything on the cover of the pre-merge issue to make readers suspect something significant was in the offing.

Art: Mike Lacey

Whizzer and Chips had at this point existed for 15 years, since the beginning styling itself as '2 comics in one', with the Chips section appearing within Whizzer. Readers were encouraged to separate the two comics and there was friendly rivalry between those readers who preferred the Whizzer section (referred to as Whizz-Kids and led by Sid of Whizzer's Sid's Snake cover strip), and those who favoured the Chips section (dubbed Chip-ites, who followed Shiner, the cover star of Chips).

Apart from some cryptic references on Sid and Shiner's pages, it wasn't until the centre spread that the fateful news was announced, in a nice set by Frank McDiarmid where the Whizz-Kid and Chip-ite leaders, in a process familiar from team games in all school playgrounds, selected their recruits from among the new arrivals. The two Whoopee survivors who had originated in Cheeky Weekly and became weekly features in their new home were both to become Chip-ites.

The above strip was not entirely honest about the number of inductees - it neglected to mention Bleep who transferred into the Chips section the following week (this omission was presumably to allow an even amount of divvying up by Sid and Shiner). Also not mentioned explicitly was the Calculator Corner puzzle feature that moved into Chips along with Calculator Kid.

I'll be examining the post-Cheeky Weekly careers of Cheeky, Gran, Stage School, Mustapha Million, Paddywack and Calculator Kid in more detail at a later date.

P.S. Any Family Trees fans keen to see more of 'The Saplings' who were introduced in Whoopee dated 24 November 1984 will be disappointed to learn that despite a caption promising they would return, the tiny trees were never seen again.

Whoopee welcomes Wow! (and loses its exclamation mark)

In February 1980 an ailing Cheeky Weekly, having notched up 117 issues, finally succumbed to the increasing burden of reprints and fillers, and was merged into IPC stablemate Whoopee! Inevitably, some of the strips which had featured in the toothy funster's comic were consigned to comics oblivion, but a select few managed, in a kind of comics version of survival of the fittest, to shoulder their way into the amalgamated titles.

Comic merges of this kind, where the most popular strips from a title whose circulation had fallen to unsustainable levels were shoehorned into a more successful comic, were a common occurrence in the early 1980s. Initially the cover of the amalgamated comic would carry the stronger comic's title above the name of the comic it had absorbed, but usually the secondary title would eventually be quietly dropped from the cover in readiness for any further merges that may ensue (assuming the comic was not itself absorbed into another title).

The final issue of Whoopee! to include a reference on the front cover to the Cheeky title was that dated 25 July 1981.

Veteran Whoopee! readers were therefore probably not surprised to learn at the end of June 1983 that their comic was about to consume another IPC funny paper, Wow!

All the Cheeky Weekly characters that survived
the merge into Whoopee! had continued to feature
in the combined comic, and all made the transition
into Whoopee and Wow!
However, in the move, some fared better than others.

Wow!'s publication history spanned issues dated 05 June 1982 to 25 June 1983, a life just half as long as that of Cheeky Weekly. This was probably a symptom of the increasingly harsh economic realities that confronted British comics as the 80s progressed; any under-performing titles were culled much more swiftly.

As mentioned earlier, when a merge occurred it was necessary for each title to drop their less popular strips in order to accommodate the best-performing features in the combined comic. Remarkably, however, all the strips that had transferred from Cheeky Weekly in its merge into Whoopee! also survived the absorption of Wow!

The first combined issue of Whoopee and Wow!, dated 02 July 1983, included the following strips that had originated in Cheeky Weekly;

• Stage School (still a 2-page feature and now promoted to pages 2 and 3)
• 6 Million Dollar Gran (now undergoing her second reboot in a strip titled Gran's Gang, but reduced from 2 pages to 1)
• Paddywack (a single row, 3-panel strip)
• Cheeky (ignominiously reduced to a single row on the Quick Strips page. Cheeky's strip had initially been 4 pages per week at the time of the merge with Whoopee! but had slowly been reduced until it was one page a week just prior to the merge with Wow!)
• Mustapha Million (still a 2-pager but demoted from pages 2 and 3 to 28 and 29)
• Calculator Kid (remaining a single pager)

Calculator Kid's spin-off strip, Calculator Corner, which had appeared after Cheeky Weekly merged into Whoopee!, also continued after the Wow! merge.

Representatives of all the ex-Cheeky Weekly strips could be found on the cover of the first combined Whoopee and Wow!, heading from the Whoopee Office towards a somewhat meagre celebratory feast considering the number of guests. Cheeky's peripheral position on the cover accurately reflected the reduced circumstances in which he now found himself.

Joining the combined comic from Wow! was Frank McDiarmid's 2-pages-per-week Boy Boss.

Evidently IPC felt an abundance of exclamation marks on its comic covers was something to be avoided, so Whoopee! lost the ! it had sported since its inception.

Goodbye Krazy

In the same week that Cheeky Weekly number 26 hit the newsagents, readers of Krazy comic, in which the Cheeky character had originated, learned that the current issue was to be the last, and as from next week Krazy would merge into one of IPC's long-running titles, Whizzer and Chips.  Merges were the customary fate of comics whose sales figures had fallen below viable levels.  By merging the most popular strips from the failed title with an existing, more successful comic, the publishers hoped to deliver a circulation boost to the established title, in the form of the erstwhile readers of the defunct comic.

Krazy, which launched on 16 October 1976, almost exactly a year before Cheeky Weekly appeared, was a bold attempt to try something new; a melding of the traditional British humour comic with a less rigid, Mad Magazine-influenced style.  In Krazy, one-off humorous features appeared alongside the standard weekly strips, so that readers were never entirely sure what each issue would contain.  Some found this approach refreshing, but maybe it was too unsettling for those who preferred a comic consisting of the same strips every week.

Launching spin-off title Cheeky Weekly may in fact have hastened Krazy's demise.  Not all comic readers had access to unlimited budgets, and a significant number of those who had up until then read Krazy may have opted to drop Cheeky's progenitor title in order to fund their purchase of Cheeky Weekly.

Ironically, Cheeky made a reference to Krazy comic on the Tuesday page of Cheeky Weekly issue 26, which shared the same cover date as the final Krazy.  Krazy's precarious state would have been obvious to readers of Cheeky Weekly, as in the issues dated 14 January 1978 and 25 March 1978 the slogan 'Save a comic - buy Krazy' had been seen in the Cheeky's Week strips.  Presumably the decision to bring Krazy to an end had already been made by that stage.  The demise of  their comic would not have been a surprise to Krazy readers, either, as the cover of Krazy's 11 March 1978 issue, had read 'Save this comic, buy it'.

Cheeky had featured in 2 regular strips in Krazy; his own 'Ello, It's Cheeky feature, and The Krazy Gang where he appeared as a member of the titular group.  The Krazy Gang (with Cheeky) survived the merge and continued to appear in Whizzer and Chips.  'Ello, It's Cheeky did not continue after the merge, except in the sense that its format continued in the Cheeky's Week strips in Cheeky Weekly.  An intermittent Krazy series that began under the title Cheeky's Pal eventually evolved into The Burpo Special, a feature that was resurrected in the pages of Cheeky Weekly some 8 months after Krazy's cancellation.

In Krazy's final 'Ello, It's Cheeky strip, the toothy funster introduced his pals from Cheeky Weekly and invited readers to join him in his own comic, thereby risking a split in readership as some decided to move to Cheeky Weekly, while others opted to follow their Krazy pals into Whizzer and Chips.

In addition to the work he did in Cheeky Weekly, the prolific Frank McDiarmid had produced a total of 44 Cheeky-related pages in Krazy since Cheeky Weekly's launch, including the final 'Ello, It's Cheeky strip.  As with his Cheeky's Week work in Cheeky Weekly, Frank's terrific workload was eased by other artists on the Cheeky-related strips in Krazy.  The other artists' Cheeky output in Krazy since Cheeky Weekly started breaks down as follows; Barrie Appleby 7 pages, Dick Millington 18, Jim Petrie 4, Jim Watson 25, and there is one artist whose name I don't know, who drew the Bird Spotting page (a Cheeky-related feature) in Krazy dated 25 February 1978.