IN AND OUT OF THE EAGLE 35

After Dan Dare, EAGLE's longest running character was Chicko, the three picture comedy strip by Norman Thelwell, which appeared weekly on the Editor's Page. This strip about a young boy contained no dialogue, although it often contained writing in the form of signs, book titles or notices. The strip appeared in the first six issues of EAGLE, from April 1950, before taking a break of three months, during which time Thelwell moved from the Wirral to Codsall to take up a teaching post at Wolverhampton College of Art. Chicko returned to EAGLE in August (issue 20) and then continued weekly until 1962 when EAGLE was radically overhauled. Chicko's last appearances were in the 1962 EAGLE Holiday Extra and the EAGLE Annual for 1963. Thelwell's EAGLE connection began when he produced some cartoons for Marcus Morris' Parish magazine Anvil and he subsequently drew a half page strip called Pop Milligan, about a canal bargee. This strip was included in the dummy edition of EAGLE which Morris submitted to publishers in 1949. However it did not appear in the published weekly.

Thelwell also produced cartoons for Punch, illustrating more than 1,600 over a twenty five year period. He contributed political cartoons for the News Chronicle and later the Sunday Dispatch. He became famous for his Punch cartoons about the changing countryside and little girls on horseback and subsequently created Penelope and her horse Kipper for the Sunday Express in 1962. Many of his cartoons were collected in books and he became one of the best known of EAGLE's contributors. He died in 2004.