Eagle Times vol.39 no.1 [Spring 2026]

For transparency's sake I'll say up front that there's an article written by me in this issue of Eagle Times. Is it the best thing in the issue? I'll have to leave that for you to decide (I'm biased!), but it does highlight something that's always worth a mention. The volume number shows that Eagle Times is in its 39th year, but there's always something new to write about when it comes to Eagle and the other related Hulton papers.

You would think that a strip that appeared in the early issues would have been widely covered, but that wasn't the case when I began looking into the origins of 'Skippy the Kangaroo'—no relation to the TV show—which was assumed to be a reprint from abroad. Not so, as I quickly discovered. I'm not going to repeat the whole article here, but it involves an animation house set up by "the French Walt Disney" Andre Sarrut, two brothers from Russia who began producing films in the UK, and a good deal of post-War misfortune.

Skippy is only one of ten features in this issue. Given the detail that some of the articles goes into and that they discuss strips that may have lasted for years, it's no surprise that many of them are multi-part, so in this issue we have part 3 of David Britton's look at 'Heros the Spartan' and part 4 of his look at 'Jeff Arnold, Rustler and the 6T6 Outfit', which this time has an emphasis on the Texas Rangers and local flora. I did say that the articles could be quite diverse.

Steve Winders offers a short tribute to the late Alan Vince, a story about P.C.49 (adapting one of the radio plays), the first part of a look at 'The Last of the Saxon Kings' drawn by Patrick Nicolle, an unwelcome addition to the paper when it first appeared across Eagle' centre pages and the first part of a look at 'Ordinary people and familiar places in Dan Dare'. So half the articles are written by people called Steve... that has to be a record for Eagle Times, surely!

Jim Duckett's lead article features 'The Adventure Club', an almost forgotten series of stories by thriller writer J. Jefferson Farjeon, whose novels I have been enjoying in the British Library Crime Classics series (notably The Z Murders, an early serial killer yarn, but also locked room murder mysteries Mystery in White, Thirteen Guests and Seven Dead). And at the magazine's opposite end, Alan Candish looks at the 'Greatest Britons' survey of 2002 and how many appeared in Eagle. 

The quarterly Eagle Times is the journal of the Eagle Society, with membership costing £30 in the UK, £50 (in sterling) overseas. You can send subscriptions to Bob Corn, Mayfield Lodge, Llanbadoc, Usk, Monmouthshire NP15 1SY; subs can also be submitted via PayPal to membership@eagle-society.org.uk. Back issues are available for newcomers to the magazine and they have even issued binders to keep those issues nice and neat.