IN AND OUT OF THE EAGLE 56

 

One of the many 'Dan Dare' products produced during the 1950s was the Wallis Rigby 'Anastasia' Presso Book. This provided press out cardboard parts which made up into a model of Dan's spaceship, named in honour of Digby's Aunt Anastasia, who was instrumental in preventing the Treens from conquering Earth. Brian Hayes, an EAGLE Society Member and collector recently acquired a copy of this book and has made up the model as shown below. Brian placed a Kentoys 'Dan Dare' figure for scale.  

Normally when these books become available, collectors are reluctant to spoil the book by making the model, but Brian found a poor quality book with browned and brittle text pages, but perfect metallic model pages, so he was happy to make up the model.  

IN AND OUT OF THE EAGLE 55

This is the front page of D.C. Thomson's Hotspur story paper dated August 23rd 1947 and the 'eagle' picture is notably similar to our own EAGLE symbol which adorned the weekly from Issue One in April 1950. Our own symbol was created by Frank Hampson and was based on an 'eagle' shaped inkwell on Marcus Morris' desk. The choice of the name EAGLE for the weekly was inspired by the 'eagle' lectern in Morris' parish church, St. James' in Birkdale, Southport. 

The Hotspur was launched in 1933 as a weekly for boys, which contained text stories, not comic strips. It was the last of D.C. Thomson's 'big five' boys' story papers, after Adventure (1921), Rover (1922), Wizard (1922) and Skipper (1930) to be launched The first issue sold over 350,000 copies and my father bought one, which I still have. During the Second World War it became a fortnightly publication due to paper rationing, increasing to three issues a month in 1946 and back to a weekly in 1949. It ran for 1,997 issues until October 1959, when it was relaunched as a comic strip paper and initially retitled The New Hotspur. It then ran for another 1,110 issues until it merged with Victor in January 1981. 

Like many boys' papers, The Hotspur stories and later strips covered school, sports, detective, war, spy, science fiction and historical adventure stories. 
 

EAGLE TIMES Vol. 38 No. 3 Autumn 2025

The new EAGLE Times is out now. In this issue are articles about Willie Patterson, Ron Embleton and John Burns' strip 'Wrath of the Gods', which joined EAGLE when it absorbed Boys' World; Luis Bermejo's work on 'Heros the Spartan', and the second part of the back page strip about Winston Churchill 'The Happy Warrior'. There is also the latest part of David Britton's 'Me Too' series about female artists of the 1950s, which looks at the art of Daphne Bevis Rowles, whose work included the 'Nicky Nobody' strip for Swift. The issue also includes two more 'In and Out of the EAGLE' pages by Jim Duckett, the first part of a new Archie Willoughby story 'The Case of the Brand New Hat', a page looking at some of the readers' letters that appeared in EAGLE and four pages of our own readers' letters. Copies can be obtained from Bob Corn at the address on the right.