More on Robin Hood

Lew Stringer seems to have been particularly disappointed with the BBC’s new Robin Hood Adventures magazine, accusing it of dumbing-down horribly. Since Lew is normally inclined to defend the current state of the British comics industry, seeing evolution where others see decay, this is pretty damning.

He is particularly puzzled by the huge divergence between the style of the comic strip (comedy) and the style of the TV show from which it is spun-off (melodrama). It is indeed a particularly stark example, but changes of tone are common in transition between the media. I have noted before that the Doctor Who Adventures comic strip, while it captures some of the zest and energy of the television programme, has none of its darkness or romance. The reasoning is presumably that these elements are not suitable for children – but the children are only reading the comic strip because they like the TV programme of which those elements are a part. This puzzled me when I was a boy, and it puzzles me now. (I suppose there are some cases where a child aspires to watch a television programme which is indeed unsuitable for him or her, and makes do with a comic adaptation as a substitute, but that is unlikely to be the case with Robin Hood or Doctor Who.)

Something similar affected a previous adaptation of a TV Robin. In an interview with Look-In: A Tribute to the Junior TV Times, writer Angus P Allan recalled, “My relationship with the comic ended slowly. It began with the increasing editorial pressure to diminish and finally ban all violence, at whatever level. I cannot now imagine why Look-In continued to pay for the rights to A-Team while forbidding me even to show a pistol in the strip. Insane. And when the editor bought Robin Of Sherwood and asked me to write it without bows and arrows … well! The ensuing argument resulted in getting my own way, but I had to promise to use arrows only to send messages or convey climbing lines to castle battlements. What a nonsense! It was at that time that Look-In began to fall heavily in circulation, and no wonder. I don't agree with blood and gore and mindless violence at all, but kids love a bit of mayhem, and God knows there's enough of the real thing around.”

The reasoning of editor Colin Sherbourn is set out in this interview on the same site.


I’m sad to note that Angus Allan died last month. There’s an obituary at the bottom of this page.

Anyway, enough with this! I’m unlikely to spend £1.99 for another two pages of Robin Hood comic strip per issue. Instead I’ll be saving my pennies for the Book Palace’s forthcoming collection of all the Frank Bellamy-drawn Robin Hood strips from Swift, as announced by Steve Holland on his Bear Alley blog.



Panels and pictures
Illustration by Paul Cemmick from Robin Hood Adventures issue 1, BBC Magazines, 10-23 October 2007

Robin of Sherwood, script by Angus P Allan, art by Mike Noble, colour by Arthur Ranson, Look-in, scan taken from The Gerry Anderson Complete Comic History

Robin Hood and his Merry Men, from a page of Frank Bellamy artwork from Swift circa 1956, scan downloaded from an art dealer’s page so long ago that I can so longer remember where it was

Uncollected: Heros the Spartan

Over at Yet Another Comics Blog, Dave Carter asks what omnibus editions we’d like to see.

Well, I’m not too keen on omnibuses as such: I’d rather have books that I can hold open without having to undertake a course of weight training first. But there is one comic collection I’d very much like to see but probably never will: Heros the Spartan, written by Tom Tully and drawn by the incomparable Frank Bellamy, the supernaturally-tinged story of a Roman soldier, born in Sparta, posted to a monster-haunted ancient Britain.

One problem with reprinting Heros is its format: it appeared stretched across the centrespread of the tabloid sized Eagle comic, treating the whole area as a single page. The landscape pages of Frank Miller’s 300 - a story and format inspired by Heros - are not much more than a quarter of that size.

(Click to enlarge)

Even so, Bellamy’s work on the Thunderbirds comic strip from TV21, which used the same format, has been reprinted several times, at least in part. But Thunderbirds has a life of its own, as demonstrated by the existence of an ongoing comic even now. Heros never stuck in the popular consciousness like his stablemate Dan Dare. I guess that if anyone was going to reprint the strip, it would have been to cash in on 300, with Frank Miller cover quotes.

Frank Bellamy – The Checklist says that one Heros story, “The Island of Darkness”, was reprinted last year by Douglas Shaw, but my Google-fu has failed to turn up any more information about either Shaw or the reprint. I guess I’ll have to ask.

It would still be nice to see the whole thing. If my quick calculations are right, all of Heros the Spartan would fit on to only about 100 big, wide pages. Even at 360mm by 580mm, that needn’t be a wrist breaker.

Panels
Heros the Spartan by Tom Tully (script) and Frank Bellamy (art), Eagle Annual 1966, Odhams Books, 1965

Page of Heros the Spartan downloaded from an art dealer a while ago – I’m afraid that I didn’t note the name or URL

F.A.B. … ish

Heidi at The Beat seems surprised that there are still Thunderbirds fans. I suppose it never did take off in the USA the way it did in Britain and Japan, among other territories.

In Britain, there is still a Thunderbirds magazine. Well, I say “still”, but this version, from Redan Publishing, only began publication in 2000. Redan claims to distribute about 45,000 copies an issue – remember, the UK market is about a fifth the size of the US, so that’s not at all bad, especially given that the final episode of the TV series first aired in 1966, and the last of the original source material, the movie Thunderbird 6, came out in 1968. (The magazine is explicitly based on the 1960s TV series and films, not the 2004 movie or, for that matter, the Thunderbirds 2086 anime series from the 1980s.)

Having said that, the magazine is thin pickings for us older geeks. In the issue I have before me, there is a fumetti recreation of a TV episode’s story which would once have delighted me, but is less of a thrill now that I have a DVD player with a freeze-frame facility.


There is also a comic strip, running to 5 pages, which looks like this.


It seems a far cry from the glory days of the TV Century 21 strip, when a typical page might look like this. (As with the other pictures in the post, except the cover, click to enlarge - but this one is most worth it, by the curse of Irzan!)


To be fair, anyone’s comic art is likely to suffer from a comparison with Frank Bellamy’s. And according to The Gerry Anderson Complete Comic History, Redan has aimed its magazine at 4-7 year olds – probably about 4 years younger than the intended readership of TV21. Simple, empty, brightly coloured, shadow-free art seems to be what editors think young children want these days.

So, the Thunderbirds strip has survived by evolving. I am no longer its natural habitat, but I hope it continues to survive in its niche.


Pictures

Thunderbirds Magazine issue 85, Redan Publishing, 2007. Cover art possibly by Lee Sullivan; photos from the 1966 Thunderbirds TV episode “Ricochet”; strip Thunderbirds Are Go “Ghost Ship”, uncredited, art possibly by Lee Sullivan

Thunderbirds, part 1 of a story attributed to Scott Goodall, art by Frank Bellamy, TV Century 21, 30 September 1967, reprinted as “The Earthquake Maker” in Thunderbirds … to the Rescue, Ravette Books, 1992

Nasty Frank

Frank Bellamy was one of the leading British adventure strip artists of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. I’ve wittered on about his Doctor Who art before, but he was also well-known for the dynamic and dramatic artwork he provided for the likes of Dan Dare, Heros the Spartan and Fraser of Africa for the Eagle, Thunderbirds for TV21 and Garth for the Daily Mirror. But I have never really associated him with comedy. I had forgotten Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book for Boys and Girls.

I stumbled across my copy recently while rearranging my bookshelves (yes, that was a thrilling day at Gad, Sir! Towers, I can tell you). Bert Fegg was a pseudonym for Terry Jones and Michael Palin, and various bits of 1974’s Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book for Boys and Girls later resurfaced in their post-Monty Python work. The chapter “Across the Andes by Frog”, for example, would be developed into an episode of Ripping Yarns.


Most of the illustrations in the book were by the cartoonist Martin Honeysett. The example above is from “The Famous Five Go Pillaging: An Exciting Tale of Children Caught Up in the Danish Invasions”. But Frank Bellamy also contributed artwork for a two-page strip, “A Cowboy Story”. Click the pages below to enlarge them to legible size.


It seems to me that Bellamy’s art here serves the same purpose as the voiceovers on Monty Python’s fake trailers, adverts and slideshow lectures. It creates a set of genre expectations which can then be subverted by deadpan absurdity. It is important that Bellamy should draw this exactly as he would if it were a serious adventure strip: the faintest hint of silliness in the art would be fatal to the joke.

The whole book is quite a hoot. If you ever come across a copy at a reasonable price, snap it up.

The Bellamy of the Daleks

The Daleks are back again on Doctor Who on Saturday. Their appearances are now so frequent that they are in danger of overexposure.

They hadn’t been on screen for the best part of six years when “Day of the Daleks” aired in 1972. The Radio Times marked the event by putting this Frank Bellamy drawing on the front cover. It is, perhaps, my favourite piece of Doctor Who artwork ever.


(In case you're wondering, the band around the Doctor’s head is part of the mind probe the Daleks used to establish that this Doctor was the same person as the others they had met.)

I wasn’t the only one to be impressed. A year later, Target Books acquired the rights to reprint three Doctor Who novelisations written in the 1960s, and they chose to copy Bellamy’s design for their covers. They couldn’t get Bellamy himself to do the work, so they hired the younger Greek artist, Christos Achilleos, to impersonate him. The reprints were a hit, and Achilleos went on to draw a couple of dozen more covers in the same style, as Target started commissioning new novelisations. But here is that first cover.



Frank Bellamy wasn’t Achilleos’s only inspiration. He must have lacked photo-reference, because those two Daleks are swiped from Ron Turner’s 1966 artwork for The Daleks comic strip in TV Century 21.



The Radio Times commissioned a good deal of Doctor Who art from Frank Bellamy in the 1970s. The listing for each Saturday’s episode was accompanied by a small, postage-stamp sized, illustration, like these from the six-part “Planet of the Daleks”.



The most striking of Radio Times’s commissions from Bellamy was a four-page comic strip adaptation of the opening of part 1 of “Colony in Space”. The page layouts were startling even by Bellamy’s standards.



After Jon Pertwee left the part, Radio Times cooled on Doctor Who, and the show was only given the cover once in the last fifteen years of its original run. So this terrific illustration for “Terror of the Zygons” appeared on an inside page.



By the time of the 1996 TV movie with Paul McGann, attitudes had changed again. Not only did it make the cover, but Radio Times commissioned a half-page comic strip, written by Gary Russell and drawn by Lee Sullivan, which ran for the best part of a year. The strips can be found at the Doctor Who Cuttings Archive.

Today, Doctor Who can count on being on the RT cover several times each series. But it’s all photographs nowadays, inside and out.


Pictures and Panels:
Doctor Who illustrations by Frank Bellamy, Radio Times, 1971-1975, reprinted in Timeview: The Complete Doctor Who Illustrations of Frank Bellamy, Who Dares Publishing, 1985

Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks by David Whitaker, 1964, cover illustration by Christos Achilleos, Target Books edition, 1973

The Daleks by David Whitaker (script) and Ron Turner (art), TV Century 21, 1966, reprinted in The Dalek Chronicles, Marvel Comics UK, 1994

Into the World Below

So, if I don’t like the way Shawn MacManus drew undersea scenes in Aquaman, how do I think it should be done?

Here are some good examples by Ron Embleton …


… Frank Bellamy …


… and Jack Kirby.


Bubbles and swirls, bubbles and swirls.


Panels from: Stingray “Atlanta Kidnap Affair” by Alan Fennell (story) and Ron Embleton (art), TV21, Century 21 Publications, reprinted in Stingray … Stand By For Action, Ravette Books, 1992

Garth “People of the Abyss” by Jim Edgar (story) and Frank Bellamy (art), Daily Mirror, 1972, reprinted in Garth Book Two: The Women of Galba, Titan Books, 1985

New Gods “The O’Ryan Gang and the Deep Six”, written and drawn by Jack Kirby, inked by Vince Colletta, New Gods 4, DC Comics, August-September 1971, reprinted in Jack Kirby’s New Gods, DC Comics, 1998

Where I'm Coming From

My first memories of comics date from around 1970. I must have read nursery comics before then – or had them read to me – but, like many Brits, I find The Beano lurking at the start of my memory lane. My favourite strip was The Bash Street Kids, by the remarkable Leo Baxendale, but my favourite artist was Robert Nixon, who had taken over Roger the Dodger from Ken Reid.



I would later follow Nixon over to IPC (or Fleetway, or whatever the company was called that week), and strips like Kid Kong for the likes of Shiver and Shake and Whizzer and Chips.

Adventure comics at the time were dominated by television adaptations. The finest in my young days was Countdown, later renamed TV Action, and I was particularly taken by the artwork of Gerry Haylock on UFO and Doctor Who.



It wasn’t until a dying TV21 was swallowed by Valiant that I encountered the original characters now associated with 1970s British comics, like The Steel Claw, Kelly’s Eye, or my favourite, Janus Stark.



By the time 2000AD started up, I felt that I was too old for comics, so it was with guilty pleasure that I picked up the occasional issue. A few years later, and more secure in my tastes, I bought up a complete run to date from a younger boy.

But I hadn’t given up comics completely in the meantime. The hardbound volumes of Astérix were much more respectable than the British weeklies, and Albert Uderzo’s artwork appealed to me enormously (as did René Goscinny’s writing, although at the time I tended to attribute all virtue to the artist). I soon ran out of the English translations, and started struggling through my older brother’s copies of the French editions, whose British distributor used to enclose notes explaining all the French puns and cultural references.



And there were also newspaper strips. My father preferred the Daily Mirror, my mother the Daily Express or Daily Mail, so I was exposed to a range of strips from Andy Capp to Garth to Fred Bassett.



There were also the political cartoonists: Keith Waite, Cummings and Mac in those three papers, and, best of all, Trog (Wally Fawkes) in The Observer and Punch.



(The original of that portrait of British Prime Minister Ted Heath would have been in colour, but I have scanned it from the 1977 black and white collection, The World of Trog.)

What of American comic books and superheroes? To tell the truth, I wasn’t impressed. To be sure, I hadn’t seen them at their best, but in the weekly editions put out by Marvel UK. What had been intended as a single issue in America would have been chopped nonsensically into three or four parts to be read separately. In addition, the colour would be missing, and the artwork blown up to about half as big again as the intended size (and possibly “bodged” to fit a different shape of page), leaving it looking empty and crude.



It wasn’t until I missed a bus in 1981, and bought a US comic on a whim to pass the time, that I engaged with the real thing. The comic was Justice League of America 195, the first part of a JSA/JLA team-up by Gerry Conway and George Perez. I was instantly taken with the idea of Earth-2 and its 60-something Superman.

After a few months trying to cope with the seemingly random distribution of US comics to British newsagents, someone told me about specialist comic shops. So, during the 1980s, I was able to eat up Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Dark Knight Returns, Warrior, with its remarkable starting line-up of Marvelman, V for Vendetta and Laser Eraser & Pressbutton, Eddie Campbell’s Alec, Love & Rockets, Levitz and Giffen’s Legion of Super-Heroes, American Flagg, Escape, Watchmen … in short, I had joined the mainstream of English-language comics culture; where I am still paddling a quarter of a century later.