Terry-Toons Comics #50
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeTerry-Toons Comics #50 (cover-dated November 1946) marks the first comic book appearance of Heckle and Jeckle, the wisecracking twin magpies who rank among Terrytoons' most enduring creations alongside Mighty Mouse. Their debut in the pages of this anthology placed them in print almost simultaneously with their theatrical emergence, bridging the animation studio's growing postwar star system and the newsstand. The pair's irreverent, slapstick-driven personalities — one speaking in a brash New York accent, the other in a refined British drawl — were a genuinely fresh comedic formula that set them apart from every other funny-animal duo of the era, and their comic book footprint would ultimately span four publishers across four decades.
ComicBooks.com Value
Show all 15 grades ▾
This exact issue on ebay
Sell my copy
Have this issue — or a whole collection? Get a fair offer from us, skip the marketplace fees and the hassle.
We Buy Collections ▸History
Terry-Toons Comics was a licensed anthology that Timely Comics (the forerunner of Marvel) had been publishing since October 1942, adapting Paul Terry's Terrytoons studio characters for the newsstand. The magpie duo had only just been introduced to theater audiences that same year — prototyped in the theatrical short The Talking Magpies (January 4, 1946), in which they were depicted as a married couple, then refined into identical male troublemakers in The Uninvited Pests (November 29, 1946). Their comic book bow in issue #50, released to newsstands September 17, 1946, therefore arrived right in the window when the characters were still being defined on screen. The creative talent behind the cartoon originals — producer Paul Terry, writer Tom Morrison, and directors Connie Rasinski and Mannie Davis — shaped the characterizations that the Timely comic adaptors then translated to the page.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First comic book appearance of Heckle and Jeckle, the anthropomorphic twin magpie duo created by Paul Terry at the Terrytoons animation studio.
- Published by Timely Comics (the predecessor company to Marvel) with a cover date of November 1946 and an on-sale date of September 17, 1946, per the Marvel Database.
- Appeared in the long-running Terry-Toons Comics anthology series, which Timely published from October 1942 through August 1947 — a total of 59 issues — before St. John Publications assumed the license.
- The characters had only just debuted on screen: their theatrical prototype short, The Talking Magpies, was released January 4, 1946, and the short that established their familiar identical-male personas, The Uninvited Pests, did not arrive until November 29, 1946.
- In their original cartoon conception, Heckle speaks in a tough New York accent while Jeckle uses a polished British dialect — a dual-personality dynamic carried into the comics.
- Heckle and Jeckle would go on to headline their own dedicated comic series at four different publishers — St. John Publications (#1–24, 1951–55), Pines Comics (#25–34, 1956–59), Gold Key (#1–4, 1962–63), and Dell (#1–3, 1966–67) — making this their publishing origin point.
- The Terry-Toons Comics series at Timely occasionally featured work by early Marvel talents; the series' opening issues included contributions attributed to a young Stan Lee.
- Paul Terry himself considered the Heckle and Jeckle theatrical series the finest work his studio ever produced, according to both Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic and Don Markstein's Toonopedia.
Cast · 2 characters
Key issues in Terry-Toons Comics
Reviews
Reader reviews
No reader reviews yet.