Eagle Times, Vol 21 No 2

Summer 2008 Contents

• An EAGLE nobody knows - the dummy second issue
• The many faces of Jeff Arnold - illustrators of Riders of the Range
  
• Blackbow the Cheyenne - from Comet to Swift to EAGLE
  
• Comics 101 - I was there (part 2)
• Guy and John - wartime experiences of Guy (Edward Trice) Morgan and John Worsley
  
• Never again will anyone envisage Man's future like this - Frank Hampson's vision
• Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008) - a personal tribute
• EAGLE on the Web
• Journey into Space: Frozen in Time - a review of Charles Chilton's new BBC radio play
  
• The Science Museum's Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-tech Britain exhibition reviewed
• PC49 - The case of the Pink Panic (part 2)
  
• A Dan Dare postscript to 'An EAGLE nobody knows'
• The 2008 Eagle Society Weekend - review and photographs
  
• Great EAGLE O'er the Silvery Forth - a poetic tribute to the Eagle Society's visit to Edinburgh (in the style of William McGonagall)
  

The picture on the front of this issue of Eagle Times is from Eagle Riders of the Range Annual 1961 and is by Harry Bishop.

Eagle Artists - Giorgio Bellavitis

Giorgio Bellavitis (1926 - ) was born in Venice. As a teenager during World War II, he was a member of the anti-Nazi resistance movement and was imprisoned for several weeks with Mario Faustinelli and Alberto Ongaro. The three friends invented a costumed righter-of-wrongs called ‘L’Asso di Picche’ (‘The Ace of Spades’). After the war they set up a publishing company, gathered a number of artists and writers together to form the Grupo Veneziano (Venetian Group), and launched a magazine called Albo Uragano (White Hurricane), which later became renamed, (after its lead strip) Asso di Picche. The strip was pencilled by Hugo Pratt and inked by Bellavitis and Faustinelli. After the revamp, one of the first new strips was ‘Junglemen’, the first episode of which was drawn by Bellavitis, who then drew ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ under the pseudonym George Summers. After Asso di Picche folded in 1948, the majority of Bellavitis’ work until 1954 seems to have been for Il Vittorioso (The Conqueror). His strips included ‘I Cavalieri del Corvo’, ‘Acqua Cattiva’, ‘Il Palio di Siena’, and ‘Amburgo 1947’. Early(?) in this period he also created ‘La Strada Senza Fine’ (‘The Road Without End’), for Corrierre dello Scolaro.

In 1954, Bellavitis moved to England, and some time after, he was instrumental in introducing the Italian illustrator Rimaldo D’Ami (Roy Dami, founder of the Damy Agency) to Britain. He was the therefore first of many Italian comic strip artists to be published in Britain.

Bellavitis’ first strip after arriving in England was ‘Paul English’ for Swift. He then drew ‘Mark, the Youngest Disciple’ to a script by Chad Varah, his finest work for Eagle. Bellavitis stood in for Richard Jennings on two complete ‘Storm Nelson’ adventures, the first of which was set in his place of birth*. He also drew for Eagle Annual and Swift Annual, including the illustrations for a text story ‘The Winged Devils - a tale of the Ancient Vikings’ in Swift Annual No 2. He worked for a short time on Express Weekly, drawing ‘Rodney Flood’, and he is known to have done some illustrations for the Sunday Pictorial Children’s Annual. In 1956 he helped out on Eagle’s ‘Jeff Arnold in Riders of the Range’. His work also appeared in Playhour and Treasure. In 1958, however, he returned to Italy to pursue a career in architecture.

Professor Giorgio Bellavitis is now actively involved in the conservation and restoration of Venice, advising UNESCO and other bodies. Girogio Bellavitis' projects in Venice have included, in the 1980s, the garden design and landscaping for Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, the home of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and from 1997 to 2005 direction of the restoration of Ca’Foscari. Giorgio Bellavitis has written and co-authored a number of books and is the author of ‘Venice: a City in the Sea of History’, which prefaces the Heritage Guide to Venice published by the Touring Club of Italy.

The picture above is from 'Mark the Youngest Disciple', Eagle, 12th November, 1954.

* The Eagle strip 'Storm Nelson' was later reprinted in Italy in Giorno dei Ragazzi as 'Kid Tempesta'.

Eagle strips

• ‘Mark the Youngest Disciple’ (Vol 5 N0 46 - Vol 6 No 23)
• ‘Storm Nelson: The Quest of the Golden Queen’ (Vol 6 No 29 - Vol 6 No 46)
• ‘Storm Nelson: The Quest of the Southern Cross’ (Vol 6 No 47 - Vol 7 No 14)
• ‘Riders of the Range : The Hooded Menace’ (half of 1 episode, Vol 7 No 23)
• ‘Riders of the Range: The Wreckers’ (with Brian Lewis) (Vol 7 No 36 - Vol 7 No 44)

Eagle Annual strips

• ‘Storm Nelson in The Mystery of the Purple Patch’ Eagle Annual No 6

Links:

• Previous post on eagle-times: Regarding Giorgio Bellavitis
• Lambiek Comiclopedia entry: Giorgio Bellavitis
  

ET Ref:

• Tiner, Ron. 'Giorgio Bellavitis'. Eagle Times Vol 13 No 1 p16 - 21.

Eagle Artists - Michael Charlton (1923 - 2008)

Michael Alan Charlton was born in Poole, Dorset, and studied at Poole School of Art and Edinburgh College of Art. An illustrator in black and white and colour, his only know contribution to Eagle was the single black and white picture shown here, which he drew to illustrate an Arthur Catherall story called ‘Ten Days to Christmas’ - “a short story of Ojibwa fur trappers in the land of perpetual snow”. It appeared, appropriately enough, on 14^th December, 1951 (in Eagle Vol 2 No 36). He also illustrated ‘Professor Kitto and the Magic Ray’ in another Eagle-associated publication: Swift Annual No 2 (Hulton Press, 1955), for which he drew three black and white pictures. Charlton illustrated dozens of books from 1954 through 2003, including the children's book Wheezy (Bodley Head, 1988), which he also wrote. He lived in Dorset, and died there after a long illness on 23^rd June, 2008.

An obituary and bibliography of Michael Charlton can be read at Steve Holland's Bear Alley, which is where we learned of Michael Charlton's death.

Dan Dare Cap Badge - supply your own cap!

Out soon, in case you missed the news at down the tubes and elsewhere, a new piece of licensed Dan Dare* merchandising will be available very soon from Termight Replicas - Dan Dare's Spacefleet Cap Badge.

The illustration shows Chris Weston's concept art for the badge, which is based on Frank Hampson's original 1950s design. Readers of Eagle Times will have seen the article on Chris' Dan Dare action figure designs in the Spring 2008 issue, which followed up on information originally posted on Chris Weston's blog.

Cast in zinc alloy and gold plated with red and black enamel circles on the front, the badge will have a diameter of 45mm and a maximum thickness of 4mm (not including the brooch pin). The enamel will be applied to recesses in the metal, so the red and black areas on the actual badge will be flat, rather than as shown in the concept art.

The badge can be ordered from Termight's site. The preorder price is £9.95, and they badges should be ready by the beginning of July, 2008.

*Dan Dare created by Frank Hampson © The Dan Dare Corporation Ltd. 2008

Eagle's cutaway drawings

Eagle's cutaway drawings feature ran from the very first issue, 14th April, 1950, until 19th April, 1969 (Vol 20, No 16). The run was not continuous - on about 40 occasions other features replaced it, such as 'Chicko's Christmas Party' (1954 Christmas issue) or, on 14 occasions, the results of painting competitions. Also, some features that are sometimes counted as part of the series are not strictly "cutaway" drawings. It was not headlined as 'An Eagle Cutaway Drawing' until 1963. It was however, the longest running feature in Eagle (since, apart from a four-episode original story which began at the end of Vol 18, 'Dan Dare' had gone into reprint at the beginning of Vol 18, and remained as such until Eagle's demise in 1969 (Vol 20 No 17).

From 1950, and for over a decade, "cutaways" filled the top half of the centre pages as a full colour centre-spread. Later the feature was moved, initially still in colour, to fill the back page and then back inside the magazine, but on a single page in black and white. There seemed no limit to the technologies covered: from the historic, to the contemporary, to the futuristic: trains, boats and planes, trams, hovercraft and rockets, spacecraft, cars, buses, motorways, underground railways, fighting vehicles, motor cycles, power stations - and the photocopier.

By far the most prolific artist was Leslie Ashwell Wood, an example of whose work is seen above*. Of the (depending how you count it) 946 issues of Eagle that included cutaways, 617 were by him, including the very first, and the last (in the penultimate issue of Eagle).

In all, around two dozen artists contributed to the feature, the most notable after Leslie Ashwell Wood being: J. Walkden Fisher, John Batchelor, Geoffrey Wheeler, Laurence Dunn, Hubert Redmill and Roy Cross. It is likely that in many cases authorship of the text that accompanied the drawings is attributable to the artists themselves. This is certainly the case for the leading artists, who would have done their own technical research, and may be true for many of the lesser-known artists too.

The following is an alphabetical list of all the artists who are known to have contributed to Eagle cutaways, together with the numbers of their contributions. In some cases only a single name (presumably the surname) is known. Around a dozen contributions are unattributed to any known author.

• P. J. Ashmore (1)
• John Batchelor (44)
• __? Blake (1)
• __? Bowyer ( 3)
• Bruce Cornwell (4)
• Roy Cross (23)
• Gordon Davies (10)
• Laurence Dunn (48)
• Eric Eden (3)
• Albert Charles Martin Ellis (3)
• Dennis Fairlie (2)
• Charles Hurford (4)
• R. Nicholl (1)
• Paul B. Mann (5)
• Gerald Palmer (19)
• Hubert Redmill (39)
• T. C. Renwick-Adams (1)
• John S. Smith (2)
• J. Walkden-Fisher (59)
• Brian Watson (1)
• Geoffrey Wheeler (44)
• Leslie Ashwell Wood (617)
  

Selected cutaway drawing from Eagle are reprinted in:

• The Eagle Book of Cutaways, Denis Gifford (Ed.) Webb & Bower, 1988. (Although credited with featuring exclusively L. Ashwell Wood drawings, one illustration, of Dan Dare's 'Anastasia' spacecraft, is by Eric Eden)
  
• The Eagle Annual of the Cutaways, Orion Books, September 2008.
  

*The cutaway drawing of the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle by Leslie Ashwell Wood appeared as the centrespread in Eagle's second birthday issue, Vol 3 No1 (10th April, 1952).

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.

Dan Dare - man of iron?

So, does Dan Dare do the ironing - or does he have more pressing engagements?

I was amused by this graphic of Dan Dare while attending the press preview of the 'Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-tech Britain' Exhibition (which is open at the Science Museum in South Kensington until November, 2009).

For its time, the 'Dan Dare' strip was forward looking, socially as well as technologically, anticipating the further emancipation of women: Jocelyn Peabody never fitted the classic "dumb female" stereotype of hero fiction - she was a scientist, a space pilot too, definitely not there just to scream and be rescued. I'm not sure I ever expected to see Dan with an iron in his hand, though, unless it was for playing golf - on the moon or elsewhere!

But what of the exhibition? Well, I can assure you that it's well worth a visit. That applies not only to fans of the original Eagle and their contemporaries, but to anyone who wants to know more about the development of technology in Britain between 1945 and 1970, and the impact on home life of design and innovation in those "Eagle times".

There are three sections. The first, as you enter, focusses on 'Dan Dare', and tells in brief how Eagle and Dan Dare came into being, how the 'Dan Dare' strip was produced, and some of the merchandise that was available to children of the 1950s.

Highlights of this section include artist Frank Hampson's 'Dan Dare' murals, which were originally commissioned by the museum in the 1970s, and two cabinets, one of which includes some examples of original 'Dan Dare' artwork plus one of Frank Hampson's "ideas books" used when he was planning the alien technology that would appear (in 1956) in the 'Dan Dare' strip 'Rogue Planet'.

The other cabinet displays other the 'Dan Dare'-related memorabilia: the 'Dan Dare': Stamp Album, Card Game, Radio Station, Construction game, etc. To anyone who attended the major Eagle exhibitions in Southport in 1990 and 2000 (Eagle's 40th and 50th anniversaries), this aspect of the display might appear more modest, but this exhibition is not just about 'Dan Dare'. 'Dan Dare' is used as a symbol of the times, a model for the optimism of Britain, its faith in technology in the post-war years, and a lead-in to the rest of the exhibition.

The "signature exhibit", providing a bridge to the technology, through another Eagle link, is a Bristol Bloodhound air defence missile, a pillar of UK's defence against the Soviet threat between 1958 and 1964. Reminding us that Eagle was not just a comic, a reproduction of Leslie Ashwell Wood's cutaway drawing of the Bloodhound (from Eagle Vol 10 No 5) is also on display.

Having set the theme, the second part of the exhibition is 'Building a New Britain' and covers everything from the creation of the National Health Service to the investments of government in nuclear power and the atom bomb. The third part looks at the reinvention of the home, the merging importance of design and the impact on everyday life with the arrival of previously unheard of consumer goods. Arguably, more use of Eagle imagery might have been used in these sections. For example, the section featuring the Dounreay nuclear research station might have, but did not, include L. Ashwell Wood's cutaway (from Eagle, 18th October, 1957). Several other examples, occur to me, where Eagle imagery could have been exploited. Seeing a section of the upper fuselage of the De Haviland Comet 1 aircraft that crashed in 1954, I was reminded that the Comet had featured as 'The First Four-Jet Airliner in the World' in Eagle's 4th issue. The Festival of Britain coverage could have used Lawrence Dunn's cutaway of the Dome of Discovery, or L. Ashwell Wood's cutaway of the (3-D) Telecinema. The WE177 air launched nuclear bomb, which entered service in 1966, never featured in Eagle, however, as it was on the top secret list!

While you're there, take a look elsewhere in the museum. On the ground floor in the permanent exhibition you'll find four more original 'Dan Dare' artboards. Nearby, you'll find a V2 rocket, like those which, as he watched them rise into the sky over the Scheldt Estuary in the closing stages of World War II, inspired Frank Hampson (though in Antwerp, at the receiving end) to dream of space travel.

Links

Science Museum:

• Audio introduction to Dan Dare Exhibition (mp3)
• Online Stuff (including Frank Hampson's Dan Dare murals)
• Object Wiki (Objects from the Dan Dare Exhibition)
  

BBC News videos:

• Dan Dare creator's son: "Peter Hampson, son of the Eagle comic strip character's creator Frank, says Dan inspired a generation. The character Flamer was based on Peter."
• Dan Dare 'inspired innovation': "The Science Museum's Ben Russell and John Liffen on technology that reflects the ideals of the comic hero created by Frank Hampson."

British Satellite News video:

• Celebrating the birth of High Tech Britain (may not work in all browsers)
  

Guardian picture gallery:

• In Pictures: Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-tech Britain (gallery of 9 pictures)
  

Other related articles:

• How the 1950's hero Dan Dare helped shape history with Utopian visions (Times Online)
• Where Dan dares, boffins follow: (Telegraph)
• Daring to be Different: (Evening Standard)
• Dan Dare exhibition latest to revisit lost era of the Fifties (Times Online)
• Histories: Heroes for hard times (New Scientist)
• Sufferin' satellites! We've built the future! (Guardian)

Eagle Times earlier post: Dan Dare & the Birth of Hi-tech Britain