▶︎ Chucklers Weekly (3): Pat Boone, Bob Rogers and make a book cover!

Previous Chucklers Weekly posts: covers and comics.

Apart from the comics, Chucklers Weekly included short stories, puzzles, general knowledge features, pop music news, competitions and readers' advertisements (Exchange Corner and Penfriends). The content was wholesome, even educational, fare. (Crystals are interesting!) There was nothing here that would upset parents at a time when comic books had had some bad press.

The pin-up boy of Chucklers Weekly was Pat Boone, the clean-cut American crooner and movie star who had hits with whitebread versions of Little Richard and Fats Domino songs and otherwise occupied the lighter end of the pop spectrum. He even wrote an advice book for the youngsters called 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty that I remember being promoted through Chucklers Weekly. In fact, looking back, Chucklers Weekly was nuts about Pat Boone, almost an Aussie branch of his PR team.

Of the two white-collar-and-tie disc jockeys featured here, Bob Rogers from 2SM in Sydney was the most famous nationally. Five years later, by then with 2UE, he was embedded with The Beatles' tour of Australia, an arrangement that was continually crashed by 2SM's Mad Mel, a wacky deejay from America who would have seemed shocking in 1959.

For all my posts about Chucklers Weekly click through to the label CHUCKLERS WEEKLY.

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▶︎ Chucklers Weekly (2): comics

About a third of the Chucklers Weekly was given over to full page comic strips, Australian and imported. These comics appear in the two editions I have, each filling one or two pages:

• Captain Justice (Australia, Monty Wedd)
• King Comet and the Space Rangers (Australia, Monty Wedd)
• The Blue Triangle featuring Dan Cooper (Belgium, Albert Weinberg, French-language comic, from Tintin magazine)
• Rivets (USA, George Sixta)
• Beetle Bailey (USA, Mort Walker)
• Wendy and Jinx (UK, wr. Valerie or Michael Hastings, dr. Ray Bailey, from Girl magazine)
• The Jackson Twins (USA, Dick Brooks)
• All About Debbie Reynolds (Australia, Arthur Hudson)

There is also a single strip for younger children:

• Joey Jumper Serial (Australia, Anonymous)

And a single panel cartoon:

• Wilbert (USA, Gill Fox)

Australian illustrator, writer and animation artist Monty Wedd (b.1921) is a prolific creator of historical and educational comic strips. He began drawing the fictional bushranger comic Captain Justice in the late 1940s, before Chucklers Weekly, and he later continued it in the Australian Woman's Day in the 1960s. From the 1970s he produced well-researched comic strip series about real life Australian bushrangers, Ned Kelly and Ben Hall. Monty Wedd's work was also seen in the Australian Children's Newspaper, published by the national broadcaster the ABC (it was the second magazine I ever subscribed to, after Chucklers Weekly). Arthur Hudson who drew All About Debbie Reynolds (below) and Monty Wedd both contributed to the The Australian Children’s Pictorial Social Studies series of educational comics.

For all my posts about Chucklers Weekly click through to the label CHUCKLERS WEEKLY.

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References, further reading: 1. Dan Cooper at CoolFrenchComics.com. 2. Monty Wedd - Australian cartoonist by Greg Ray at Collecting Books and Magazines. 3. Dick Brooks, The Jackson Twins at Lambiek.com. 4. MortWalker.com and the Wikipedia entry on Beatle Bailey. 5. Wendy and Jinx: Valerie and Michael Hastings at Steve Holland's Bear Alley; Ray Bailey at Lambiek.net. 6. George Sixta, Rivets at Lambiek.com and ComicStripFan.com. 7. Gill Fox at Ger Apeldoorn's 50s blog. 8. John Ryan, Panel By Panel (1979).

▶︎ Chucklers Weekly (1)

Chucklers Weekly was a children's magazine published in Sydney that seems to have flourished in the mid- to late-50s. It was the first magazine I ever subscribed to, when I was 9 or 10 years old. I was a member of the Charlie Chuckles Club, named for the magazine's kookaburra mascot.

My childhood collection being lost forever, I bought these two copies online, from 9 January and 28 August1959.

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For all my posts about Chucklers Weekly, click through to the label CHUCKLERS WEEKLY.

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▶︎ Percy Leason in the USA

After I posted one of Percy Leason's Wiregrass cartoons, John Adcock over at the excellent Yesterday's Papers sent me some examples of Leason's illustrations from the time when he'd emigrated to New York.

Leason left Australia in 1937 and his family followed soon after. He stayed in the States until his death in 1959, painting, teaching, railing against modern art, and illustrating for books and magazines. (Garrie Hutchinson, Wiregrass: A Mythical Australian Town, 1986.)

These illustrations are from 1958, for the Golden Stallion series by North Dakotan writer Rutherford G. Montgomery.

Coincidentally, Percy Leason is currently included in an exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia until 19 October, Misty Moderns: Australian Tonalists 1915 -1950. The theme of the exhibition is the tonalist Australian painter Max Meldrum and his followers. At the ABC Melbourne website you can see a charming Leason portrait of his chidren, from the exhibition.

[Click on an image for larger view.]