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Welcome to the web home of THE EAGLE SOCIETY.

THE EAGLE SOCIETY is dedicated to the memory of EAGLE - Britain's National Picture Strip Weekly - the leading Boy's magazine of the 1950s and 1960s. We publish an A4, quarterly journal - the Eagle Times.

This weblog has been created to provide an additional, more immediate, forum for news and commentary about the society and EAGLE-related issues. Want to know more? See First Post and Eagle - How it began.

Saturday 14 December 2013

Eagle Times Vol 26 No 4

Winter 2013 Contents

  • An appreciation of the work of artist Peter Jackson, whose illustrations appeared in The Evening News, Look and Learn, Express Weekly (for whom he drew the strip 'Mark Fury') and Eagle - for whom he drew the true-life stories 'The Great Explorer' (David Livingstone), 'The Travels of Marco Polo' (taking over when Bellamy moved on to 'Dan Dare'), and 'Gordon of Khartoum'
  • An obituary of Bob Bartholomew (1923-2013) Eagle's Editor from 1962 - 1969
  • 'TV21 revisited' - another look at TV Century 21, a rival paper to Eagle, that was published from 1965 - 1971 with contents largely devoted to strips based on the Gerry Anderson Television series such as Stingray and Thunderbirds, and which used a number of former Eagle artists including Frank Bellamy, Richard Jennings and Eric Eden 
  • 'The Rivals of Jeff Arnold No. 12: Roy Rogers' - on the man who took the acting name of Roy Rogers and appeared in numerous western movies from the mid-1930s, inspiring a prolific number of comics and books from the 1940s through the 1950s
  • David Jacobs, C.B.E. (1926 - 2013) - an obituary of the prolific British broadcaster, disc-jockey and actor, fondly remembered by many for his contribution to Charles Chilton's Journey into Space radio series in which, as well as being the announcer, he took on a total of 22 different roles
  • 'Miraculous survival of the last Frank Hampson artwork' - on the mural 'Inventions That Altered Our World', the last piece on which Frank Hampson worked before his death in 1985 and which had to be restored after 1987, when the garage it was stored within lost its roof in the great storm 
  • 'Hornblower in Eagle - Part 2': on the final two strip stories based on C.S. Forrester's Hornblower books that appeared in Eagle, and the enduring popularity of the character
  • 'It's Not Rocket Science' - a reflection on the difficulties of modern life. Eagle Society member Steve Winders' amusing after dinner talk from the 2013 Eagle Society gathering at Leamington Spa
  • 'PC49 and the Case of the Lost Christmas Tree' - a seasonal crime caper for Eagle's "copper", adapted from one of Alan Stranks' radio plays 
  • 'Boys' World: Ticket to Adventure' - a review of Steve Holland's book about the short-lived rival to Eagle that appeared in 1963 and merged with it in 1964, after 89 issues
  • 'From Under the 1950s Christmas Tree: Eagle Guns' - on the various toy firearms that appeared in the 1950s, based on 'Dan Dare' and 'Riders of the Range' - from ray-guns to six-guns, water-pistols to cap-guns, projectors and torches
  • '50 years ago . . . the First Dan Dare Club began' - on the early days of 'Dan Dare' and Eagle fandom, and the publication of the first 'Dan Dare' fan magazine, Astral, "The Official Journal of The International Dan Dare Club"
  • 'The Beast in Loch Craggon' - an examination of the "monster" strip that ran in Eagle in 1963, drawn by John McLusky (who also drew the 'James Bond' strip for the Daily Express)
The cover artwork for this issue of Eagle Times is by Peter Jackson