Comic Cuts — 11 February 2022

I've spent half the week looking at Death Game 1999 and trying to learn more about the artists involved in drawing it. While most people will remember Ron Turner from the Spinball days of the strip in the later Action and the Spinball Wars in the merged Battle Action, the name that keeps coming up is Massimo Bellardinelli... but he only drew a handful of episodes. Most of them were handled by two brothers working for the same studio in Rome.

I tried to contact one of the brothers late last year, only to discover that he had died. The other brother... who knows? He seems to have disappeared from the comics' scene many years ago and chances are he has also passed on. He'd be almost 90 by now if still around.

Sadly, the news this week here in the world of UK comics has been dominated by the death of Ian Kennedy. I had the good fortune of meeting Ian many years ago when the team behind Starblazer came down to London to attend UKCAC. This would have been in the autumn of 1988, shortly after I'd submitted a script, a fantasy, although I would have rather have written a galaxy spanning SF yarn as I was hoping to have it drawn by Enrique Alcatena (at that time still a mystery figure as far as we Starblazer fans were concerned).

My fantasy story was accepted and, with a few suggested changes taken on board, was published in December 1989 with a fantastic cover by Ian, which you can see above. During the intervening year a ton of things were happening. I'd managed to write a second acceptable story, but real life was getting in the way: the factory where I was working closed down and I went on the dole for a couple of months before picking up a college course, which turned out to be the wrong course, but the right move as it resulted in me picking up a job in London. So I started commuting, which didn't leave a lot of time for anything else.

That lasted a year and came to an end around September 1990. I made a couple of attempts at getting another story together, but by the time I had something to show the editors, Starblazer had folded and when my attempt at writing a Commando was met with a rejection slip I gave up, wrote The Mushroom Jungle and then got a job editing Comic World.

My second Starblazer also had a brilliant cover by Ian Kennedy. I can't tell you how pleased I was with it. I bought half a dozen copies of that issue at our W H Smiths. It's still one of the favourite things I've ever written.

Meeting Ian himself was a pleasure. Myself and Tony O'Donnell sat with him and the two Bills (Graham and McLoughlin) in a corner of the student bar. Ian was everything you would want from one of your heroes: a polite, gracious, generous gentleman. He discussed his drawing technique and how he would sharpen his pencils to a long point. Why that particular detail should stick in my mind I don't know.

His career spanned seventy years and you can see the attention to detail he always put into his art even in his earliest strips — his Davy Crockett from the mid-1950s is unmistakably his work. He was considered a key artist by the likes of Barrie Tomlinson, who used him to create the look of Dan Dare in the new Eagle and a number of other titles like Wildcat and Ring Raiders.

But it is for his air war strips for Air Ace Picture Library and his Commando covers that he's likely to be remembered. The former need to be reprinted; the latter did get an outing in the Art of Ian Kennedy book, but with over 1,000 covers to choose from, there must be a couple more books that could be put together from this remarkable total. I'd do it in a shot!

I did, in fact, do a reprint of an Ian Kennedy strip entitled Frontline UK, back in 2014. It's out of print now, but you might be able to pick up copies from eBay or Amazon.

Vale Ian Kennedy.