The Eagle Annual of the Cutaways (review)

The latest in the series Eagle Annual of the… has now been published by Orion Books.

The Eagle Annual of the Cutaways takes the same look and format as last year’s Eagle Annual - The best of the 1950s comic, with an identical page-count (176 pages), but is priced at £14.99 (£2 more than the earlier book). Rather than the dark green spine with yellow lettering previously used, though, this book has a dark blue spine with cream lettering. Both books have a "distressed" look and feel. The Editor is again Daniel Tatarsky, and the book has a Preface by Colin Frewin, Chief Executive of the Dan Dare Corporation Limited, and an Introduction by Jonathan Glancey, Architecture Critic, the Guardian.

The Eagle Annual of the Cutaways collects together, in (what seems to this reader's mind) a less than systematic manner, around 142 of the 946 cutaway drawings that appeared in Eagle throughout its life from 1950 until the penultimate issue in 1969. For anyone who fondly remembers Eagle and its cutaways, but who doesn’t still have their collection, this will be a “must buy”. But the market for this book is clearly “nostalgia” rather than serious appreciation or study. This book will sell, and deserves to, but it will also disappoint the more serious collector or student.

Comparisons are inevitable with Denis Gifford’s earlier collection, The Eagle Book of Cutaways (Webb & Bower, 1988). While covering less material and restricting his book (with one notable exception*) to the work of Leslie Ashwell Wood, rather than the full range of Eagle cutaway artists, Gifford treated the material with more respect than is evident here. In Denis' book, the page layout and colour reproduction were excellent, there was no cropping of the illustrations – and the pages are clean! Here, there is better coverage of the work of the many artists who produced cutaways for Eagle, but sometimes their illustrations are cropped - to the extent that occasionally explanatory text is partially lost, or the artists’ signatures are partially, and in some cases completely, lost. As an example Laurence Dunn’s ‘The Dome of Discovery’, from Eagle, 4^th May, 1951 (which incidentally is reproduced less cropped in the Eagle Annual - Best of the 1950s comic) is cropped top and right, in the process losing some of the illustration and Laurence Dunn’s signature. In addition nearly all the pages carry that artificial "distressed" look which was a problem for many (including me!) when we saw Orion Books’ earlier offering. In my opinion, putting artificial "grime" on the pages detracts from the content and shows a lack of respect for the original artists, especially when it strays onto the artwork. I don't think these aspects sit easily with this dedication, quoted here from the Preface:

"This book is dedicated to all the highly talented artists who created these wonderful cutaways."

There is much to commend this book. Eagle Society member Steve Winders has already written an excellent review, posted at Steve Holland's Bear Alley blog. Any more detailed comments I might make would inevitably repeat much of what he has said there, so I will leave my comments to those above. There is also a review by Jeremy Briggs, well worth reading, at the Down the Tubes blog.

Further related links:

• eagle-times initial post (May 2008) on the Eagle Annual of the Cutaways
• more from eagle-times on Eagle's cutaway drawings with a list of artists
  
• Jeremy Briggs follow-up post to his review at Down the Tubes: Eagle cutaway art.

* The cutaway of Dan Dare's spaceship Anastasia, published in Eagle 7th February,1958, was not by Ashwell Wood, although Denis Gifford included it in his book. By the way it does not appear in the Eagle Annual of the Cutaway.

Eagle Annual of the Cutaways

Last year Orion Books produced Eagle Annual: the Best of the 1950s, with the promise of this year bringing out a sequel, Eagle Annual: the Best of the 1960s. Well it now seems the latter has been put back a year, to 2009, and the intervening space will be filled by the Eagle Annual of the Cutaways, which is due for publication on 18th September, 2008. According to the Orion website, the book will be 176 pages (some sources are quoting a longer book, but this seems to be an error), which makes it the same length as last year's Annual - although it will be priced £2 more at £14.99.

To quote Orion's publicity:

"After Dan Dare, the most famous and fondly remembered part of the Eagle comic was the cutaway. Basically, these were beautifully detailed drawings of the inner workings of pretty much anything: from steam trains, jet liners and racing cars, to oil wells, suspension bridges and tube lines beneath Piccadilly Circus. The Eagle had a team of three or four artists, but the king of the cutaway was undoubtedly L. Ashwell Wood, whose forensic attention to detail - be it a cross section of the Cutty Sark or a grand landscape of how electricity is generated - enthralled a generation of school boys."

As seen above, the book will have the "distressed look" of last year's Annual. We have seen it reported elsewhere that the "distressed look" will be confined to the cover. This appears to be based on some illustrations that appeared in a Daily Mail article (9th May, 2008) about the Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain exhibition at London's Science Museum. However, a 12-page handout on the Eagle Annual of the Cutaways that was made available at the press launch of the Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain exhibition implies otherwise. Unless the publishers have had a change of heart since printing that handout (which, to be fair is identified as an "uncorrected proof sampler - not for resale or quotation"), the distressed look will pervade the whole book. Which will not please many of Eagle's original readers, judging by some of the reactions we heard to last year's Annual.