Montague Thomas Archibald Wedd (1921–2012) 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 depression working 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). During this time he continued studying commercial art at night at East Sydney Technical College. He then worked as a furniture artist and salesman at Grace Bros. before joining the armed forces in 1941, where he served in the Australian Army, First Artillery Survey Regiment, and then the RAAF, where he attained the rank of Leading Aircraftman (34 Squadron). After the war he spent three years studying under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, completing his arts course at East Sydney Technical College, during which time he produced his first comic strip, Sword and Sabre, a story about the French Foreign Legion. Wedd sold it to Syd Nicholls' publishing company, where it appeared as three monthly episodes in the Middy Malone magazine. Wedd also produced eight more comic strips for Nicholls, including Bert and Ned and Captain Justice (a bushranger who righted wrongs). After Nicholls closed his comic line, Wedd began supplying comics to Elmsdale Publications, including Tod Trail and Kirk Raven. In December 1950 New Century Press contracted Wedd to produce twenty three Captain Justice stories, with the hero now located in the American Wild West, for £102 per issue. 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. It became a best-seller with sales of up to 100,000 per issue, despite being banned in Queensland, apparently on the grounds that the bad-guy protagonist kept escaping his just deserts to fight another day. 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.