On leaving the animation field Wedd concentrated on freelance work and production of a new comic strip based on the life of Ned Kelly. Wedd was in great demand during Captain Cook's Bicentenary celebrations, creating historic strips, illustrations and cards for everything from TV series to Minties and washing powder between 1969 and 1970. The original plans for "Ned Kelly" were to run it for 25–30 weeks however Wedd approached the "Sunday Mirror" with a proposal to produce a detailed examination of Kelly's life on an open-ended basis. 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. Replacing "Ned Kelly" was another Wedd strip about bushrangers, "Bold Ben Hall", which followed the same approach and format, running for 400 episodes. This was subsequently followed with another equally long running strip, "The Birth of a Nation", devised to coincide with Australia's bicentennial celebrations in 1988. The strip was syndicated to several newspapers, and was later issued as a two-volume book, "The Making of a Nation", (self-published by Wedd) in 1988.