EAGLE TIMES Vol. 33 No.4

The Christmas EAGLE Times is out now. Featuring articles on Riders of the Range, Christmas in EAGLE, Frank Hampson and Norman Williams' Great Adventurer strip, the Pay Rates for the Christmas 1958 issue of EAGLE's companion paper Girl and the recent EAGLE Exhibition at the Atkinson Gallery in Southport, it runs to 54 pages.

The magazine is published four times a year and the subscription for 2021 will remain at £30 for the four issues (£45 for overseas subscribers). Published on March 31st, June 30th, September 30th and December 14th. They will be available from Bob Corn, Wellcroft Cottage, Wellcroft, Ivinghoe, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire LU7 9EF.   

 

GUILDHALL LIBRARY DAN DARE TALK

 EAGLE and its creation DAN DARE launched in the City of London at Shoe Lane seventy years ago. On Wednesday January 6th from 2-3 p.m. Lester Hillman will explore the phenomenon of DAN DARE and how links to real and fictional astronauts have been at the very heart of the City and its institutions. The online talk will be available on Zoom, but viewers will need to book.

The best way to book is to visit the Guildhall Library events site at Guildhall Library Events | Eventbrite

ROCKIN' AROUND THE CHRISTMAS TREEN

In 1987, Mel Smith and Kim Wilde, credited as 'Mel and Kim' as a parody of the popular sister act of that name, recorded a cover version of Brenda Lee's 1958 song Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree to raise money for Comic Relief  charities. It reached Number Three in the U.K. Christmas charts and was accompanied by a video that is still regularly shown on television at Christmas time. The video features a Christmas party which includes someone wearing a Mekon head (see above), but where does the head come from? Frank Hampson used many models in his studio back in the 1950s and a Treen mask was featured in a Pathe News film about the studio made in 1956 (see below). However this mask was clearly not the sculpted head used in the video and although Frank used papier-mache head models, such as one of Lero the Crypt from The Man From Nowhere strip, there was no full size Mekon head as far as we know. 

The Mekon head does not come from the launch of the 1980s EAGLE either. A ceramic sculpture by Pip Warwick was used there and the new EAGLE occasionally used a cardboard cutout of the Mekon for publicity photographs, so was the head created for the early 1980s Dan Dare TV series that was never made? A lot of groundwork was done for this series before it was cancelled. Storyboards and scripts were completed and the principal parts were cast, so it is quite possible that work had begun on props and costumes.