Michael Strogoff part 9

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

Lionel Fanthorpe

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was going to be talking to Radio 4 about a programme they had coming up. Originally I was supposed to be interviewed for the show but that proved impossible on the day they wanted me (I'd already committed to helping Mel's parents move house). They were on a very tight schedule, so I ended up just chatting to one of the researchers at Pier Productions and providing background material.

Anyway, the programme is due to be broadcast this Thursday on Radio 4 at 11.30 am and you can find out more about it here.

Michael Strogoff part 8

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

L. Ashwell Wood - Behind the Scenes part 4

L Ashwell Wood’s Camden Town Tube Station

by Jeremy Briggs

One of the previous articles on Bear Alley on cutaway artist Leslie Ashwell Wood covered the preliminary pencils that he did for a King George V class battleship as used by the Royal Navy during World War II. It showed that he used his pencils for this subject twice, once for a cutaway in the 1943 Odhams book Britain’s Glorious Navy and again for a non-cutaway painting of the same ship which is now part of the collection of the UK’s National Archives and which was probably originally painted for the Ministry of Information.


Wood is best known for the cutaways that he did for Eagle comic in the 1950s and 1960s when, over the course of nineteen years, he completed more than 600 paintings for the comic. Despite printing so main cutaways over such a long period of time, it is initially surprising that while Eagle did reuse subjects in its cutaways, the supersonic airliner Concorde was covered twice for instance, it didn’t reprint earlier cutaways in later issues. It has to be said that this was probably mainly due of the change of cutaway format between the 1950s and 1960s. While Wood did illustrate the same subjects twice, including the aforementioned Concorde, he very rarely reused his pencils of earlier cutaways in later ones. While he seems to have partially reused one about ocean going ships in Vol 2 No 46 and Vol 19 No 6, both entitled “The Mighty Sea” but with substantially different layouts, the only illustration that he appears to have used in two separate issues of Eagle featured London Underground’s Camden Town Tube station.;

Wood first illustrated the station in colour in Eagle Vol 1 No 27 (13 October 1950) as “Amazing Underground Flying and Crossover Junctions” in what was then the standard long format cutaway printed in the upper half of the comic’s centre spread. He then reused the pencils for this early cutaway, with a few minor modifications, for one of the much later cutaways in the comic published in Vol 18 No 2 (14 January 1967) “Longest Railway Tunnel In The World”. By this time the cutaways had been changed to full page black and white illustrations and Wood was able to reformat his original pencils enough to reuse them in this style by adding a newly created illustration of the station’s tunnels looking at them from a different angle to the main cutaway.

On the second cutaway, apart from some minor changes, there are two main sections that were changed. In the over ground section showing Camden High Street, Wood updated the station entrance and the general street scene while underground he extended the concourse at the bottom of the escalators and removed the details of the escalator mechanism. He may have introduced these changes because the original illustration was inaccurate in these areas or alternatively because of changes that may have taken place to the station over the course of the sixteen years between the two cutaways being published. Since Wood lived in London, getting to Camden Town to see for himself wouldn’t have posed too great a problem.

It is to Leslie Ashwell Wood’s credit that in the 600+ paintings that he produced for Eagle over 19 years this is the only major cutaway that he appears to have reused. Unless, of course, you know of another.

(* Eagle illustrations © Dan Dare Corporation.)

Michael Strogoff part 7

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

L. Ashwell Wood - Behind the Scenes part 3

L Ashwell Wood’s Hurricat Launch

by Jeremy Briggs

Our series of the preliminary pencils that artist Leslie Ashwell Wood used for his detailed paintings continues with this illustration of a Hurricane fighter being launched from a merchant ship during the Second World War. This illustration was published in black and white as a two page spread in two different Odhams hardbacks both published in 1944, Britain’s Merchant Navy and Warfare Today.

Wood is best known for his cutaway work during the 19 years that Eagle was published in the 1950s and 1960s but, even in Eagle, not all his illustrations were true cutaways as we have previous shown with his pencil prelim for the British 6 pdr anti tank gun, and this painting of the Hurricane launch is educational without the need for any of the image to be cut away. However before we go into the details of the artwork, an explanation of what the illustration is about.

At the beginning of the Second World War Allied merchant shipping was poorly protected from attack by U-boat and Axis aircraft. These attacks soon lead to the convoy system being introduced to help protect the merchantmen by grouping civilian ships together with naval destroyer escorts. While this gave improved defence against U-boats, enemy aircraft remained a threat either through direct attack on the ships or by passing on their position and heading to enemy shipping. At this stage in the war the big fleet aircraft carriers were too important to use to protect convoys while the small escort carriers, newly designed for the task, had yet to be commissioned. To bridge the gap between these escort carriers being ordered and actually coming into service, some British merchant ships were fitted with a catapult rail onto which a modified Hurricane fighter, known as a Sea Hurricane Mk1, could be fitted. This Sea Hurricane, nicknamed a Hurricat, could be catapult launched into the air when enemy aircraft were spotted and, despite a limited amount of ammunition, the threat of this single fighter was often enough to at least make the crews of attacking aircraft wary.

The reality for the Hurricat pilot was that his plane could not land back on its mother ship and it was unlikely to have enough fuel to reach the nearest dry land to attempt a landing. This left the pilot with the choice of bailing out or crash landing his fighter in the sea and while that doesn’t sound so bad if the convoy was in the Mediterranean, Hurricats were often assigned to convoys heading for Russia in the Artic winter. Needless to say it took a special sort of person to volunteer to be a pilot in the Merchant Ship Fighter Unit.

While in reality there were only ever nine combat launches from CAM ships, the concept of the plucky pilot punched into the air to defend his convoy before deliberating crashing his fighter into the ocean in the hope of rescue has inspired many comics writers over the years and CAM ship stories have appeared in Warlord and Commando amongst others. Titan’s release of the Battle reprint book Johnny Red: Falcon's First Flight reminds us that while Johnny Redburn and his Hurricane ended up in the Soviet Union they both came from a CAM ship in a story that was inspired by the real life actions of Flying Officer Arthur Henry Burr of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve who won the Distinguished Flying Cross for saving his aircraft.

L Ashwell Wood illustrates the Hurricane’s launch from the CAM ship and includes both its attack on a German bomber and the recovery of its pilot after he has ditched his aircraft in the sea. The comparison of the pencils with the published illustration shows how tight Wood's pencils were to the final version. One thing that is generally accepted about Wood's work is its accuracy, be it illustrations of ships, vehicles, aircraft or buildings, his attention to detail was always impressive. So it comes of something of a surprise to discover than many of the elements of this illustration are quite simply wrong.

The major inaccuracy is in the launch rail. Wood illustrates this as the type of compressed air powered launch rail that a battleship or cruiser would use to launch their spotter aircraft, aircraft that were lighter and able to fly considerably slower that a combat capable fighter. While the CAM ships did use launch rails, their Hurricanes were fitted onto a rocket sled and it was the sled that powered the aircraft into the air rather than any pressurised mechanism. In addition to this, the real launch rails were set at an angle to the ship pointing slightly to starboard for two rather important reasons. Firstly when the rockets were fired their exhaust was up to three times the length of the fighter and so it was best for them to be directed overboard rather than aimed at the ship’s bridge which would have happened if the rail was positioned on the centreline of the ship. Secondly it meant that if the Hurricat did not achieve flying speed and immediately ditched into the sea, it did it to one side of the ship giving the pilot at least a chance to get out of it rather than ditching directly in front of the ship would then have steamed over the top of it.

There is one more obvious error and that is the name of the German aircraft. The illustration shows a typical target for the Hurricat which is a Focke-Wulf Fw 200 long range maritime reconnaissance bomber and the printed version of the illustration calls this a Kurier. The Fw 200 was actually called the Condor and while there was a German aircraft of the era called a Kurier it wasn’t manufactured by Focke-Wulf.

There is also one less obvious error and that is that the Hurricat is missing its tail wheel – the semicircular gap for it is there on the bottom of the rear fuselage but the wheel is missing in both the pencil and the printed versions. There is a fallacy about the CAM ship fighters that they were always launched on one way missions (and if you weren’t planning to land on your wheels why not remove them to save weight?). In combat it is true that it was a one way mission, for the aircraft at least, but the vast majority of launches were for training purposes which were made within sight of land and after which the aircraft landed safely at a friendly airfield. Once landed the aircraft would be transported back to the CAM ship and reloaded onto the launcher. In fact at the end of each convoy cruise it was standard procedure for the Hurricat to be launched to maintain the pilot’s flying proficiency and he would certainly have needed a tail wheel to land safely.

So why did Wood get his facts about the launcher wrong? I would assume it was simply wartime secrecy over the details of the CAM ships and their launchers. Not knowing the details Wood would have made his best guess of how to launch a fighter off a freighter based on how spotter planes were launched from cruisers and battleships and extrapolated from there. Indeed he had already illustrated a spotter plane launcher on board a Town Class light cruiser, the best known of which is HMS Belfast, for the Odhams book Britain’s Wonderful Fighting Forces published in 1940 so he would have been familiar with the cruiser’s launch system. With hindsight we can look at the illustration of the Hurricat launch and see that is was wrong, yet the vast majority of the readers of the books would not have known any better.

We look back on these ships and their aircraft as part of history yet by 1944, when the two books that this illustration appeared in were published, the CAM ships had completed their designed task, their duties had been taken over by the small escort carriers and the Merchant Ship Fighter Unit had been disbanded. Even then they were already part of history.


Bibliography

Britain's Wonderful Fighting Forces, ed.Captain Ellison Hawks. London, Odhams Press, 1940.

Britain's Merchant Navy, ed.Sir Archibald Hurd. London, Odhams Press, 1944. "With more than forty explanatory drawings specially prepared by L. Ashwell Wood”

Warfare Today, eds.Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, Major-General J. F. C. Fuller & Air Marshal Sir Patrick Playfair. London,Odhams Press, 1944.

(If you missed the previous two episodes of this series looking at L. Ashwell Wood's preliminary sketches, follow the link in the text to part 1. Part 2 can be found here.)

Michael Strogoff part 6

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

Comic Cuts - 11 February 2011

From the "Just when I thought..." department: Just when I thought I'd solved some of my wireless internet problems...

When we moved we couldn't get cable TV, which was a pain but something we could live with. Virgin simply don't cover this area. As we had a package from Virgin that included the phone, we knew we were going to have to switch providers and as the new place already had a phone/broadband from Talk Talk, we took over the contract. Long-time readers might recall that we spent the first few days after our move talking, or trying to talk, to Talk Talk's customer services because the phone was dead. The problem resolved itself two days before an engineer was due to come around; we found out when the engineer in question phoned on the dead line to ask if he was still needed. Apparently, the problem was caused as part of the unbundling of Talk Talk lines from BT. They just hadn't bothered to inform Customer Services (who had no idea what could have been causing the problem).

But the wireless system was dismal and Talk Talk wouldn't replace the old router with a new router because we were not classed as a new customer (we took over from an existing customer). After six months of frustration, I've finally snapped and trailed bits of wire around the house so that I can move the router into my office during the day. I now get a 100% strength signal between router and computer! Yay!

Because I deal with some fairly big images, I use file-sharing sites as part of my day-to-day job. Problems with them in the past I've put down to the wireless connection, but I now think that some sites are possibly being "throttled" by Talk Talk when there's heavy traffic. For a few days we were getting download speeds from some sites at rates between 10-20kb/sec, the kind of speed we thought we'd left behind forever after ditching the dial-up modem back in 2000 and switching to broadband. Certainly not the service promised in their advertising: "Fast, reliable 24Meg broadband".

At the time of writing that little problem seems to have sorted itself out. Now all I need to do is resolve a couple of other issues with Talk Talk: (1) why, when I cancelled call forwarding (required by the previous owner but not required by me as I work from home and don't have a mobile phone to forward calls to), have they started charging for a different, more expensive package that includes call forwarding; and (2) when will they stop charging customers in this area for a "bundled" line when, back in August, I was told that the problems I had with the phone was down to them unbundling the lines. By the way, you won't find any mention of this additional £15.32 charge anywhere on their advertising.

Given my past experiences with dealing with their customer support, I'm not expecting a straight answer. But wish me luck anyway.

The solution, by the way, isn't a very good solution. Trailing wires aside, I still have to unplug the router from my office and reinstall it in the living room if Mel wants to use the internet. I'm squeezing internet time into a smaller window of opportunity and e-mails (which often require digging around the net to find information) are stacking up again. If you've asked about something and you haven't heard from me, that's the reason.

Having some down-time from the internet does mean that I've been pushing forward with the planned Hurricane/Champion Index. I've now completed the introduction, which clocks in at around 8,500 words, and laid out 22 pages. The big news is that the cover is being produced from a piece of original artwork. Anyone who has copies of the early issues of Hurricane will know that they had wraparound covers which would have looked spectacular if the printing had been better. The covers looked muddy and the colour plates were often misaligned, giving the covers a soft, slightly blurry look. Well, I've just heard from someone who has one of these covers (one of the best!) and I should have scans any minute now. This is fantastic news, as my thoughts on the cover design are to lay it out so that it echoes the original Hurricane covers and the A4, stapled format I'm using means that the artwork will be printed same size as it originally appeared—and you'll be able to lay the index flat to get the full glorious effect.

I should have some more news on this next week. The one thing I don't know yet is the final price as it will depend on a number of things, including the price of shipping from the printers. As this is definitely a short print-run project I can't promise it'll be cheap as I won't have the economies of scale of some publications, but I'm squeezing costs down by being my own writer, designer and tea boy.

Having been involved with the translations of the 12 Storm books that make up Storm—The Collection, Storm, Normad and Ember are characters close to my heart. So I'm not sure what to make of the latest volume to appear under the Storm banner, which is apparently causing a lot of controversy over in Europe.

Since Don Lawrence's death—Don being the original artist of the Storm saga—there has been a new series of books written by Storm's creator Martin Lodewijk and drawn by the artistic team of Romano Molenaar and Jorg de Vos. I have the first two volumes they worked on and I must say that did a very good job of continuing the series, retaining the look and style that Lawrence laid down during his 25 years on the strip.

The first book of the new series was serialised in the Dutch monthly Mis, but there was no magazine to carry the next volume, so publisher Rob van Bavel took the unprecedented step and bought all the rights to Eppo, once one of Holland's favourite comics weeklies, which had folded in 1999. Storm was used as its launching pad, but the new version of Eppo has also revived a number of other classic Dutch strips.

The new regular team produced their third volume of the ongoing Chronicles of Pandarve in 2010 and a spin-off series has just been launched in the latest issues of Eppo with a new writer/artist team: Willem Ritstier and Minck Oosterveer, who were already contributing the Western detective agency series 'Ronson Inc.' to Eppo. The new book is entitled De Banneling van Thoem (The Exile of Thoem) and is the first volume of what is known as De Kronieken van de Buitenring (The Chronicles of the Outer Ring), still featuring Storm, Nomad and Ember but entirely separate from the Lodewijk-written continuation.

However, when the first four pages were released as a preview on the internet, the feedback was intensely negative, the main concern being the colouring of the strip, which had been outsourced to Caravan Studios in Indonesia. Originally a couple of colourists had been tried out without success and it seems that a decision was made to have the strip computer coloured. (I believe the above was one of the resulting early tryout pages and I'm not sure who the colourist is.)

Bart Croonenborghs, writing in The Comics Journal, summed up the controversy by saying that "Oosterveer's pencils were made almost unrecognizable by the Indonesian company's colouring work. Public outcry ensued and even though Oosterveer didn't have a hand in the colouring, most comments were rather vitrious and aimed at the pencil artist who took major offence at on one hand the reaction of the public and on the other the response of the publisher."

Croonenborghs described the artwork as "overly rendered and way too 'plastic'" and looking nothing like the work of Minck Oosterveer. "Storm is rendered like an eighties metal band runaway while Nomad's agile and nubile look has been transformed into an overly blocky steroid pumper."

You can see what Minck Oosterveer's artwork normally looks like at his official website and from the pencilled pages above. I have to admit that I agree with Croonenborghs' view that the computer colouring has done Oosterveer's work no favours whatsoever. 

Next week sees the continuation of Alfonso Font's 'Michael Strogoff' strip and I'll have some more looks behind the scenes with L. Ashwell Wood for you over the weekend.

And so to today's random scan after what has been the longest Comic Cuts column in quite some time. As I've mentioned the wraparound covers used on Hurricane, here's an image I cleaned up that probably won't get into the index.

(* Storm © Don Lawrence Collection; Hurricane cover © IPC Media; other artwork © Look and Learn Ltd.)

Michael Strogoff part 5

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

Michael Strogoff part 4

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

Michael Strogoff part 3

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

Michael Strogoff part 2

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

Michael Strogoff part 1

A while back I ran an adaptation of Peter the Whaler from Look and Learn. Our latest strip shares a couple of things in common: as well as being another classic adaptation it is, like Peter, the work of Alfonso Font. If you missed the earlier strip you can find it here, although you'll have to read from the bottom of the column upwards as I haven't had time to alter the dates to get it to run in the correct order top to bottom.

Our new strip reprint is Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar, based on the novel by Jules Verne. The novel was originally published in 1876 and set during the reign of Tsar Alexander II of Russia. Strogoff is sent to warn a besieged town, cut off by Tartar rebels, about a traitor who intends to destroy the town.

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)

Jackson Budd

Jackson Budd was a thriller writer in the 1930s. In The Author's and Writer's Who's Who he is listed as W. Jackson Budd, born in London. The only additional information is that he was a civil servant, working in Customs and Excise. In 1938 he became Chairman of the Society of Civil and Public Service Authors.

The British Library and various other sources, including copyright records, give his name as William John Budd and his year of birth as 1898. The only problem is that he's impossible to find from this information. And some records give his name as W. Jackson Budd and even as Wallace Jackson Budd. Both Jackson Budd and Wallace Jackson were pen-names used for his novels.

The only other clue is that he was married with two daughters, and it was partly from this information that I think I've managed to find out at least a little about him.

I think, but I'm not absolutely certain, that he was born in West Ham in 1896. In the early 1930s [1932/36] he lived at Plemont, Ethelbert Gardens, Ilford, Essex before moving to 129 Robin Hood Way, Kingston, London SW15, where he is listed between 1938 and 1960. This makes me suspect that he is the William J. Budd whose death is listed in Surrey in 1960, aged 63.

The reason this may be correct is that in 1962-63, the phone books lists a Mrs. M. Budd at 129 Robin Hood Way. She then appears to move to 30 Ethelbert Gardens, Gants Hill where she lived from 1963-81. Here she is listed as M. C. Budd and the death of Mary Clara Budd was registered in Redbridge in 1981. She was born Mabel Clara Skillan in West Ham on 22 August 1898 and married William J. Budd in West Ham in 1923. Two daughters followed: Pamela W. S. Budd (later Edwards; b. Romford, 1925) and Hilary Eleanor Skillan Budd (later Crook; b. Romford, 1930).

So we have a William J. Budd born in London (although West Ham is technically Essex, but has long been considered part of Greater London), married with two daughters.

I've not read any of Budd's novels, although I've seen one or two reviews. His first novel, I Stood in the Shadow of the Black Cap, is a thriller about an innocent man facing execution; The Princely Quartet is a romance set around the adventures of a touring party. Precious Company is described thus: "Berlin, Moscow, Paris, the Essex coast and the slums of Whitechapel all figure in this story of attempts to steal Russian crown jewels of inestimable value en route for London. Embroiled in this atmosphere of murder, headlong flight and close pursuit is Hugh Conway, a young engineer, whose perils, fantastic though they may be, are so graphically depicted by Mr. Jackson Budd that it is difficult to put the book down. (The Times, 6 September 1938).

Two of his novels were filmed: A Convict Has Escaped was filmed as the gritty, British film noir They Made Me a Fugitive (1947) with Trevor Howard as an ex-RAF pilot who gets involved with a gang who frame him over the death of a policeman. Budd also adapted his own novel The Gold Express when it was filmed by Guy Fergusson and Colin Bell in 1955. Budd, credited as Jackson C. Budd, also wrote Dick Barton at Bay (1950), featuring Don Stannard as the famous special agent.

Budd's later books, Around France in an 8 h.p. Car and The Story of Professor X, were self-published, as Stonevale Publications were based at his home address of 129 Robin Hood Way.

Hopefully I've not been following a red herring... if anyone can confirm any of the above, that would be most welcome.

PUBLICATIONS

Novels as Jackson Budd
I Stood in the Shadow of the Black Cap. London, Sampson Low & Co., 1932; as The Gallows Waits, New York, Putnam, 1932.
The Princely Quartet. London, Sampson Low & Co., 1932.
Tragedy in a Brick Box.  London, Sampson Low & Co., 1933.
Daughter of Illusion. London, Sampson Low & Co., 1934.
The Three Jolly Vagabonds. London, Sampson Low & Co., 1935.
Grand Ballyhoo. London, Sampson Low & Co., 1936?
The Gold Express. London, Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1937.
A Wife in Toledo. London, Sampson Low & Co., 1938.
Precious Company. London, Michael Joseph, 1938.
The Dark Horseman. London, Michael Joseph, 1939.
A Convict Has Escaped. London, Michael Joseph, 1941.
John Lisbon, Agent. London, Michael Joseph, 1942.
The Story of Professor X. London, Stonevale Publications, 1951.

Novels as Wallace Jackson (series: Insp. Clancy Martin; Archibald Penny)
Two Knocks for Death (Martin). London, Sampson Low & Co., 1934.
The Zadda Street Affair (Penny). London, Sampson Low & Co., 1934. 
The Extraordinary Case of Mr. Bell (Penny). London, Sampson Low & Co., 1935. 
The Diamonds of Death (Martin). London, Sampson Low & Co., 1936.
The Sinister Madonna (Martin). London, Sampson Low & Co., 1937.

Non-fiction as Jackson Budd
Around France in an 8 h.p. Car. London, Stonevale Publications, 1950.

Plays
The Girl with Red Hair
Professor X
The Gold Express (screenplay), 1955.