Monty Wedd

Montague Thomas Archibald Wedd (5 January 1921 – 4 May 2012) was an Australian comic artist, animator and author.

Biography Wedd was born in Glebe, New South Wales on 5 January 1921. As a school boy he was instructed in art by Oswald Brock. He left high school during the Great Depression and worked as a junior poster artist at Hackett Offset Printing Company before becoming a designer and illustrator for a furniture manufacturer, Corkhill & Lang (later Frazer's Furniture). After Nicholls closed his comic line, Wedd began supplying comics to Elmsdale Publications, including Tod Trail and Kirk Raven.

Throughout the 1950s Wedd also worked extensively as a cover artist on numerous 'pulp fiction' novels published by Malian Press, Action Comics Pty Ltd and Whitman Press.

In 1954 he returned to Emsadle where he created The Scorpion, for which he was paid £160 per issue.

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) Captain Justice appeared in the Woman's Day magazine in September 1964, where it ran until April 1965. The strip ran uninterrupted for two years. 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 He won Stanley Awards in 1987 and 1989. In 2004 he received the Jim Russell Award for "significant contribution" to the cartooning industry from the Australian Cartoonists Association.

Personal Wedd married Dorothy and they had four children, more than 20 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. In 1960 the couple founded a museum dedicated to the Australian military at their home at Narraweena, on Sydney's northern beaches. When they ran out of space it was moved and rebuilt at their property in Williamtown. The Monarch Historical Museum re-opened at its current location in November 1988. Wedd died on 4 May 2012 at a nursing home in Fingal Bay.