Monty Wedd

Monty Wedd
Born	Montague Thomas Archibald Wedd 1921 Randwick, New South Wales, Australia
Occupation	Cartoonist, animator, author
Nationality	Australian
Period	1935-1995
Influences Syd Nicholls
Influenced Roger Fletcher

Montague Thomas Archibald 'Monty' Wedd (1921) is an Australian comic artist, animator and author.

Wedd was born in Randwick, New South Wales in 1921. As a school boy he was intructed in art by Oswald Brock. He left high school during the depression working as a junior poster artist at Hackett Offset Printing Company before becoming an designer and illustrator for a furniture manufacturer, Corkhill & Lang (later Frazer’s Furniture). During this time he continued studying commerical art at night at East Sydney Technical College. He then worked as a furniture artist and salesman at Grace Bros. before joining the armed forces in 1941, where he served in the Australian Army, First Artillery Survey Regiment, and then the RAAF. After the war he spent three years studying art under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme. He created his first strip, Sword and Sabre, a story based on the French Foreign Legion, during the 1946 Christmas break. It was sold to Syd Nicholls’s publishing company and appeared as three monthly episodes in the Middy Malone magazine. During this period he produced eight more comic strips for Nicholls, including Bert and Ned and Captain Justice (a bushranger who righted wrongs). After Nicholls closed his comic line, Wedd began supplying comics to Elmsdale Publications, including Tod Trail and Kirk Raven. In December 1950 New Century Press contracted Wedd to produce twenty three Captain Justice stories, with the hero now located in the American Wild West, for £102 per issue.

In 1954 he returned to Emsadle where he created The Scorpion, for which he was paid £160 per issue. for Elmsdale. It became a bestseller with sales of up to 100,000 per issue, despite being banned in Queensland, apparently on the grounds that the bad-guy protagonist kept escaping his just deserts in order to fight another day.

The authorities objected to the Scorpion not being brought to justice, but if he had been I wouldn't have had a series. Still, once they banned him in one state the distributor was no longer keen to handle the title at all, so that was the end of The Scorpion.

—Monty Wedd

He then produced a series of Captain Justice stories for Calvert Publications, but they had to be largely re-drawn to satisfy 1950s censorship rules and regulations, e.g. the hero’s face could not be entirely hidden, no flashes could issue from guns, no character could carry an offensive weapon in the hand, and no-one was allowed to be killed. He also wrote and illustrated eight books for Calvert about a war-time American, Kent Blake of the Secret Service. Wedd then created strips for Stamp News (on the history of the stamp) and for Dr T.S. Hepworth’s Australian Children’s Newspaper, drawing many full page adventure comics, an association which lasted for sixteen years. From 1958 he was a regular contributor to Chuckler's Weekly, for Telegraph Newspapers, with Captain Justice and King Comet.

After producing another five Captain Justice stories for Horwitz Publications, Wedd turned to animation in 1963, working for Artransa and Eric Porter on series such as Marco Polo Junior Versus the Red Dragon, Charlie Chan, The Lone Ranger, Rocket Robin Hood and Super Friends.

Captain Justice appeared in the Women's Day magazine in September 1964, where it ran until April 1965.

From 1965 through to 1966 Wedd produced the 'Dollar Bill' cartoons for the Decimal Currency Board.

On leaving the animation field Wedd concentrated on freelance work and Ned Kelly. Wedd was in great demand during Captain Cook's Bicentenary celebrations, creating historic strips, illustrations and cards for everything from TV series to Minties and washing powder between 1969-70. The original plans for Ned Kelly were to run it for 25–30 weeks however Wedd approached the Sunday Mirror with a proposal to produce a detailed examination of Kelly's life on an open-ended basis. Wedd retired from comics in July 1977, after working on the Ned Kelly comic strip for 146 weeks.

They had been going to run Captain Justice but they told me Rupert Murdoch had invested a lot of money in the Ned Kelly movie so they wanted a cartoon about Ned Kelly. I did a 140-episode true life story of Ned Kelly and then I followed that up with Bold Ben Hall.

—Monty Wedd

Replacing Ned Kelly was another Wedd strip about bushrangers, Bold Ben Hall, which followed the same approach and format, and ran for 400 episodes.

Wedd's work has appeared in a range of Australian newspapers, including Sydney Daily Mirror, Sunday Telegraph, The Sunday Territorian and Sunday Mail.

Wedd is a longtime member and former vice-president of the Black and White Artists’ Club, and lives at Williamtown, New South Wales. In 1993 he was awarded an Order of Australia for his services as author, illustrator and historian. He won Stanley Awards in 1987 and 1989.

References

• Interview with Monty Wedd, artist and author (sound recording) -interviewed by Ros Bowden, 3 November 1995 LOL

• ACE biographical portraits: the artists behind the comic book characters: the Australian comic book exhibition, Australian comics 1930s-1990s, touring Australia during 1995/96 / edited by Annette Shiell and Ingrid Unger (1994, ISBN 0-7326-0829-5)

• The making of a nation: commemorating Australia's Bicentenary / written and illustrated by Monty Wedd (1988+, ISBN 0-7316-4706-8)
• Stamp stories / Monty Wedd (1970)
• Stamp oddities (1969)
• Australian military uniforms, 1800-1982 / Monty Wedd (1982, ISBN 0-949924-12-1)

External links

• Lambiek.net - Monty Wedd
• Monty Wedd
• Australian cartoonist creator of Captain Justice and The Scorpion / Greg Ray
• Scorpion / Australian Superheroes

Persondata
Name	Weld, Monty
Alternative names
Short description	Australian cartoonist
Date of birth	1921
Place of birth	Randwick, New South Wales
Date of death
Place of death