Comics, Cowboys and Beyond: An Interview with Paul Wheelahan

Paul Wheelahan can't remember a time when he didn't have a pen or pencil in his hand. Born in 1930, Paul grew up in the New South Wales country town of Dalton, where his father was stationed as a mounted policeman. When he wasn't playing with friends in the common behind the police horse yards, he spent the rest of his time "drawing dinosaurs on cereal boxes and cutting them out and standing them up all over the house."

Paul says his was a normal "bush childhood" during the Great Depression of the 1930s, which saw close to a million people out of work. "I remember lines of unemployed men at the home-cum-police station queuing up for clothing rations every second Thursday," he recalls.

Like most kids his age, Paul escaped the harsh realities of Depression-era Australia by going to the movies, which were screened at his local church hall. Here he first saw the Australian-born, Hollywood actor Errol Flynn, who starred in such classic adventure films as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Sea Hawk (1940). "He was the ultimate cinematic hero," says Paul, "an opinion I've had no reason to change in the intervening years." Radio adventure serials were also a big part of his childhood entertainment, with The Phantom Drummer being Paul's favourite.

"These all paled in comparison with comics," says Paul, "especially the truly wonderful Wags weekly tabloid-sized comic paper."

Wags was published by the Melbourne Herald newspaper between 1936-1940, and featured full-colour reprints of the best American comic strips of the 1930s, including Dick Tracy, Tarzan and Terry and the Pirates. Wags also published original strips by Bob Kane, who later created Batman, and Jack Kirby, who co-created Captain America.

"Standing shivering in the cold on the newsagent's doorstep every Tuesday morning with my pennies was the best I ever felt," Paul remembers. "I have two copies [of Wags] and they are amongst my most prized possessions."

Paul thinks that he must have always wanted to become an artist or storyteller of some kind. "I used to fill notebooks with stories, " he says, but it wasn't until 24 November 1946 when he realised that he wanted to become a comic book artist.

"That was when the Sunday Sun and Guardian's Sunbeams comic supplement published episode one of Stanley Pitt's Silver Starr," says Paul. "I freaked."

Silver Starr in the Flameworld was a science fiction saga, whose hero was an Australian soldier returned from the war, leading an expedition to the centre of the Earth, accompanied by his companions, Onro and Dyson.

Greatly influenced by the American cartoonist Alex Raymond and his pioneering science fiction strip Flash Gordon, Stanley Pitt created one of the most visually spectacular comic strips in Australian history.

The effect Pitt's work had on Paul was immediate and long-lasting. "The power, grandeur and total assurance of his dazzling artwork convinced me that this Australian was the greatest of them all."

"In the hour I first held that comic in my hands, I knew I would be a comic artist and assured everyone of this fact on that same day - including my parents, who were massively unimpressed," says Paul.

Paul, however, was so serious about pursuing his dream that he left home the following year and went to Sydney to become a comic artist!

"I was already wearing my hair longer than was acceptable," remembers Paul," and I suspect my police officer father may have been relieved when I left home at 15 to work for a man's wages and live on my own in Sydney."

Paul's first stop in Sydney was to meet his newfound idol, Stanley Pitt. "I met Stan when I came to Sydney by turning up at the Sunday Sun and introducing myself," he says, " and we immediately became lifelong friends."

Between 1949-1950, Paul began work as a comic artist, initially inking Pitt's pencil artwork for his Yarmak - The Jungle King comic book, as well as on Pitt's Sunday Sun newspaper comic strip, Captain Power.

In the meantime, Paul went knocking on publishers' doors looking for work, but with little success. "H. John Edwards started giving me filler strips of two to four page comics in [local reprints of] American books, such as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle," he recalls.

One of these filler strips was Space Hawk, a science-fiction superhero, which appeared as a back-up feature in Edwards' reprints of Wings and Rangers comics. "This was my first venture into comic strips, working with my own scripts and illustrations," says Paul.

At the time, H. John Edwards was one of Australia's biggest comic book publishers. Edwards' local titles included The Lone Avenger and The Hooded Rider, both Westerns written and drawn by Len Lawson, and Tim Valour and The Crimson Comet, two adventure series by John Dixon.

Dixon was a prolific comic book writer and artist throughout the 1940s and 1950s, before achieving international acclaim with his newspaper comic strip, Air Hawk and the Flying Doctors, which ran between 1959-1986.

"John was, and is, one of the best men to ever dip a sable hair brush in a pot of Windsor and Newton's Indian Ink," says Paul.

Paul wrote and drew a 10-page comic, Steve Ashley of Africa, about a big game hunter in the Belgian Congo, which he sold to Edwards, "but he didn't seem too interested."

Now aged twenty, Paul found himself utterly disillusioned by his lack of artistic success in Sydney and went back to live with his family in Armidale, New South Wales. On returning home, Paul got a job working on the Oaky River Dam project, where he worked as a jackhammer operator, tree cutter and as a 'powder monkey'.

"A powder monkey stuffs the long, deep holes drilled by men operating wagon drills, with gelignite, attaching fuses and blowing out huge chunks of mountainside," explains Paul.

"I worked with a certifiable maniac who was unbeaten in countless street fights and who was probably the most vivid personality I ever knew," he says.

"Some times we would put much more explosive down a hole than was required," says Paul. "We did this one day and a chunk of rock the size of a Holden sailed high over where all of us were taking shelter and came down through the iron roof of a workshop, missing a Dutch migrant worker by a whisker."

"Next day I was back on the jackhammer and the Dutchman, named Steve, was en route for Sydney and Amsterdam!"

Around 1952, Paul's Steve Ashley of Africa strip was published, as a back-up story in Len Lawson's The Hooded Rider comic book. Seeing his work in print reawakened Paul's artistic ambitions, so he set off for Sydney once again. Edwards commissioned two more Steve Ashley stories from Paul, which were again printed in The Hooded Rider.

Paul's big break, however, came in 1955 when he read an article in an American magazine about the revival of interest in the pioneer adventurer Davy Crockett, made popular by a string of movies starring Fess Parker at the time.

"I took the idea for a Davy Crockett comic to Charles Young, whom I'd met through Stan in the Yarmak era," says Paul. Charles' company, Young's Merchandising, published a range of comic books, including a series of Silver Starr comics in the early 1950s.

Debuting in 1955, Paul's comic, Davy Crockett - Frontier Scout, proved a big hit with readers. "It ran for twenty-two issues and enabled me to buy a house," he says.

Paul's next title for Young's Merchandising was the character he will always be best remembered for - The Panther!

"The Panther idea was simply to create a man who looked like a panther and justify his strange lifestyle," he says.

"I wanted him to be a slinky, stealthy man of the night," he explains, "and the jungle setting was perfect for this kind of character."

"I began drawing him lithe and lean, like a panther, but as my interest in weightlifting progressed, I noticed him getting more and more like Arnold Schwarzenegger," says Paul, "so I fined him down again!"

The Panther first appeared in 1957 and ran for over seventy issues - a record-breaking run for most Australian comics, then and now!

"I recognised that it was a good strong name and a good idea," he adds, "and it was clearly one that registered with readers."

Capitalising on the popularity of The Panther, Paul created a new adventure comic for Young's Merchandising in the early 1960s called The Raven. Set on the English moors, the mysterious, hooded Raven fought all sorts of criminals, ghosts and aliens, while evading capture by the police.

"The Raven elicited far more reader reaction then The Panther for some reason," says Paul. "I had a great time drawing it."

Paul was by now writing, drawing and lettering up to thirty pages of comic book art a month. "I have to admit that sometimes I did not pencil, but simply drew straight on to the page with pen or brush."

By the early 1960s, however, Paul's comics were amongst the last original Australian titles being published. Local reprints of American comic books had swamped the market throughout the 1950s. The situation was made worse by the introduction of television in Australia in 1956, followed by the resumption of imports of original, full-colour American comic books. These combined events forced most Australian comic book publishers out of business by the late 1950s.

Then in 1963, Charles Young died and Young's Merchandising was shut down. With the collapse of the Australian comics industry, Paul turned his hand to becoming a full-time writer. He sold his first book, a Western adventure, to Cleveland Publishing Co. in the mid-1960s, and produced Westerns at a breakneck speed for nearly thirty years.

"I found myself churning [out] the Westerns, but this seemed to result in better stories rather than worse ones," says Paul. "I found the work far easier as I'm a natural writer, whereas I had to teach myself to draw."

Writing under the pen names 'Emerson Dodge' and 'Brett McKinley', Paul wrote over 500 Western novels for Cleveland, easily making him one of Australia's most prolific and popular writers.

"Whenever I'm writing a novel, my thoughts are racing much faster than I can type. Because of this furious pace, I make a million mistakes; thank God for the PC!"

"The best stories I've ever done were written in 4-5 days at 100mph," he claims. "Invariably when I receive mail about a particular story, it is one written like this."

By the time Paul wrote his last story for Cleveland Publishing in 1996, he had cut down his output from three books per month to approximately one-and-a-half!

Paul became briefly involved in television screenwriting. He created and wrote the children's TV series Runaway Island, about two orphans living in Sydney during the 1830s, which screened on the Seven Network in 1982.

Paul wrote several episodes of the popular soap opera A Country Practice, which he says, "never saw the light of day." He was also commissioned to collaborate with Michael Laurence to write a twenty-episode sequel to Laurence's 1985 hit TV mini-series, Return To Eden. "We had an artistic falling out towards the end of it," says Paul, and the planned sequel was never produced.

Looking back on his television experience, Paul admits that he "didn't like the collaborative experience - particularly on A Country Practice, with their endless story conferences."

Paul returned to the thing that he loved doing the most- writing Westerns. Even though he no longer works for Cleveland Publishing, Paul continues to write new books through his own publishing company, Dodge Publishing. To date, he has released three self-published novels - Savage Texas, Arizona Psycho and Sons of Cain.

During the 1980s, Paul began appearing as a guest at Australian comic book conventions, talking to fans about his days at the drawing board creating The Panther, as well as seeing a new generation of Australian cartoonists try their luck at publishing their own comic books.

"I really feel for all the young, would-be comic artists I encounter at conventions," says Paul. "They're up against it in Oz, but they just stick to it - just as I would have done had I been born into their era."

"I wish them well - especially those who like my work!" he says.

This article originally appeared in the Australian Book Collector magazine. Text © copyright Kevin Patrick 2001-2007. All images and/or artwork featured in this article are copyright © 2007 their respective copyright holders.