Wally and the Major

Eighteen vols., a complete set of the annual adventures of the main characters from Tidley Winks & Wally after their enlistment in the Home Front Army for World War Two, transformation into Major Winks, Private Pudden Benson (the major’s batman), Private Wally Higgins and Australian comic history immortality. The trio, along with a rich supporting cast, shirk official duties, really any form of work, and, as soon as the War is over, head to a North Queensland sugarcane plantation, ‘the frontiers of civilisation’, according to the 1947 issue. Their distaste for work continues, fondness for local intrigue intensifies. The subjects for their adventures, and targets for their prejudices, become American serviceman, farmers, indigenous people, women, marriage, even the Melbourne Olympics, before they are lured indoors and sedated by the arrival of television, like the rest of us, on the cover of the last issue. Pictorial wrappers, stapled. Some of the staples to the early volumes have rusted, otherwise all very good or better. The eighteen volumes.…