Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Comic Lasts: Ron Embleton

As we've had a few week's break from the Comic Firsts -- and because these scans have been sat on my desktop for months -- we present a desperate excuse to run a couple of pictures by Ron Embleton. 'Terry and Son' was a weekly fishing strip published in the Daily Express in 1984-88, written by Conrad Frost. A book collecting some of the strips was published as Fishing With Terry and Son in 1987.

This was the last strip Embleton began working on prior to his death in 1988 although he worked on 'Sweet Chastity' in Penthouse simultaneously.

The cover (at top) was painted by Alex Jardine, who provided the book with a number of colour illustrations. Jardine was possibly the Alex Jardine who produced dust jacket illustrations in the 1930s to 1950s. A friend of mine recently dropped over some photos of some items he had sold through eBay which included a Sherlock Holmes jigsaw puzzle. I've no idea when it was produced but the artist was Alex Jardine. Jardine also produced other countryside and fishing illustrations. Perhaps the crime illustrator was a different Alex Jardine... anyone know for sure?

(* Terry & Son © Express Newspapers plc.)

3 comments:

  1. Did Embleton ever draw the 'Trigan Empire'? I have these images in my head from reading 'Look & Learn' as a kid and I'm sure that the images in my head are his , not Lawrences'.
    I've never seen them again and we're talking about 30+ years ago so my visual memory might not be as keen as I think it is.

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  2. Hi Simon,

    You're right: Ron Embleton did an 8-week fill-in strip for the Trigan Empire in Look and Learn, issues 383-390, 17 May to 5 July 1969 which was reprinted in issues 924-931, 6 October to 25 December 1979; it was also reprinted in Vulcan in 1976. By coincidence, I've got the Vulcan copies to hand to I'll scan a couple of pages when I next fire up the scanner.

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  3. Hi Steve,

    Have just been looking into Alex Jardine a bit after identifying him as cover artist for H Russell Wakefield's The Clock Strikes Twelve (Jenkins, 1940). Looks as though he did quite a bit that dealt with fish and fishing, so I suspect he's your man here.

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