Illustrators at 2000AD

Doing the Chris Achilleos piece yesterday, I was reminded that he had painted a cover for 2000AD back in 2001. Which reminded  me that Chris Foss had also painted a triptych of covers as well. These dated back to 1995.

And here's how they should look, minus the lettering...

I'm sure there have been other artists who are better known from other fields who have contributed to the Galaxy's Greatest Comic but one name that springs to mind - and this is slightly off tangent - is Frank Frazetta, who painted a Judge Dredd cover not for 2000AD but for MAD Magazine in August 1995 to accompany that issue's movie pastiche.

The original artwork appeared in his Icon book...

Of course, it isn't all one way traffic. Plenty of artists best know (to us, at least) for their comics from Frank Bellamy to Gerry Wood have reversed the process and produced book covers... but that's a post for another day.

Brak the Barbarian

Having just posted a piece on Chris Achilleos over on the Illustration Art Gallery blog, I thought I'd dig around for some examples of his early work. Here's the trio of Tandem reprints of John Jakes' Brak the Barbarian from 1970. Achilleos is said to have been especially pleased to be offered these as the first of the books had a Frank Frazetta cover when it was originally published in the USA by Avon.

Brak the Barbarian by John Jakes.
Tandem 0426-04677-3, 1970, 160pp, 5/-. Cover by Chris Achilleos
Tandem 0426-16707-4, 1976, 45p.

Brak the Barbarian: The Mark of the Demon by John Jakes.
Tandem 0426-04714-2, 1970, 159pp, 5/-. Cover by Chris Achilleos
Tandem 0426-16723-6, 1976, 45p.

Brak the Barbarian: The Sorceress by John Jakes.
Tandem 0426-04722-2, 1970, 156pp, 5/-. Cover by Chris Achilleos
Tandem 0426-16715-5, 1976, 45p.

R. D. Wingfield cover gallery

Given the recent weather, I couldn't resist putting this little gallery together.

Frost at Christmas (Markham, Ontario, Canada, Paperjacks, 1984)
London, Sphere, 1990.
London, Corgi 13891, 1992. Cover photo: Peter Sherrard

Ten days to Christmas and Tracey Uphill, aged eight, hasn't come home from Sunday School. Her mother, a pretty young prostitute, is desperate. Enter Detective Inspector Jack Frost, sloppy, scruffy and insubordinate. To help him investigate the case of the missing child, Frost has been assigned a new sidekick, the Chief Constable's nephew. Fresh to provincial Denton in an oversmart suit, Detective Constable Clive Barnard is an easy target for Frost's withering satire.
__Assisted and annoyed by Barnard, Frost, complete with a store of tasteless anecdotes to fit every occasion, proceeds with the investigation in typically unorthodox style. After he's consulted a local witch, Dead Man's Hollow yields up a skeleton. Frost finds himself drawn into an unsolved crime from the past and risks not only his career, but also his life...

A Touch of Frost (Toronto, Canada, Paperjacks, 1987)
London, Corgi 14555, 1992. Cover photo: Peter Sherrard

Detective Inspector Jack Frost, officially on duty, is nevertheless determined to sneak off to a colleague's leaving party. But first the corpse of a well-known local junkie is found blocking the drain of a Denton public lavatory - and then, when Frost attempts to join the revels later on, the nubile daughter of a wealthy businessman is reported missing.
__Sleepy Denton has never known anything like the crime wave which now threatens to submerge it. A robbery occurs at the town's notorious strip joint, the Coconut Grove, the pampered son of a local MP is suspected of a hit-and-run offence and, to top it all, a multiple rapist is on the loose. Frost is reeling under the strain, his paperwork is still in arrears and now, more than ever, his self-righteous colleagues would love to see him sacked. But the manic Frost manages to assure his superior that all is under control. Now he has only to convince himself...

Night Frost (London, Constable, 1992)
London, Corgi 14558, 1992. Cover photo: Peter Sherrard

A serial killer is terrorizing the senior citizens of Denton, and the local police are succumbing to a flu epidemic. Tired and demoralized, the force has to contend with a seemingly perfect young couple suffering arson attacks and death threats, a suspicious suicide, burglaries, pornographic videos, poison-pen letters...
__In uncertain charge of the investigations is Detective Inspector Jack Frost, crumpled, slapdash and foul-mouthed as ever. He tries to cope despite inadequate back-up, but there is never enough time; the unsolved crimes pile up and the vicious killings go on. So Frost has to cut corners and take risks, knowing that his Divisional Commander will throw him to the wolves if anything goes wrong. And for Frost, things always go wrong...

Hard Frost (London, Constable, 1995)
London, Corgi 14409, 1996. Cover photo: Jonathan Ring

A young boy is found dead in a rubbish sack, suffocated and with one finger cut off. Another boy of the same age, Bobby Kirby, is missing. A psychopath is stabbing babies as they lie sleeping in their cots. Enter Detective Inspector Jack Frost, scruffy and insubordinate, foul-mouthed, intuitive and fearless. The next problem for the understaffed Denton force is the abduction of Carol Stanfield, a fifteen-year-old who's found naked by the roadside, her father having paid a ransom. Robert Stanfield is a dicey customer, and Frost has his doubts...
__The corpse of a petty criminal, Lemmy Hoxton, is discovered, with the tops of three fingers chopped off. The small children of a carpet-fitter are murdered; his wife's body is found on the railway line. A supermarket MD is sent a ransom demand for the missing boy, Bobby, accompanied by one of the child's fingers. Jack Frost, brought to magnificent life by David Jason in the TV series, staggers from crisis to crisis, his bumbling modus operandi disguising his extraordinary powers of detection.

Winter Frost (London, Constable, 1999)
London, Corgi 14778, 2000. Cover photo: Michael Wildsmith

Denton is having more than its fair share of crime. A serial killer is murdering local prostitutes; a man demolishing his garden shed uncovers a long buried skeleton; an armed robbery at a local mini-mart; a ram-raid at a jewellers and a series of burglaries.
__But Detective Inspector Jack Frost's main concern is for the safety of a missing schoolgirl. Nine weeks ago, Vicky Stuart, eight years old, didn't return home from school and in spite of exhaustive enquiries and extensive searches, has never been seen since. Another little girl from the same school is reported missing. her body is found... raped and strangled.
__Frost's prime suspect, strongly protesting his innocence, hangs himself in his cell, leaving a note blaming Frost for driving him to suicide. Subsequent evidence points to the man's innocence.
__Course, insubordinate and fearless, DI Jack Frost is in serious trouble.

A Killing Frost (London, Bantam Press, 2008)
London, Corgi 15689, 2008. Cover photo: Douglas Black/Arcangel Images

A human foot has been discovered in Denton woods, a multiple rapist is on the loose, and the local supermarket has reported poisoned stock. Then two young girls are declared missing, and the Denton crime wave reaches terrifying heights.
__As DI Jack Frost staggers exhausted from case to case, something nasty arrives at the station in the form of DCI Skinner. The scheming, slippery Skinner's first job is to manipulate the transfer of the unorthodox Frost to another division.
__Will Frost find the missing girls before his new nemesis forces him away from Denton once and for all?

When Sally Met Spidey

OK, here's a poser to test your brains this bright Monday morning. What links this...

...to this?

You'll recognise Spider-Man, I have no doubt. But you might not recognise  'Spotlight on Sally', which was an Arthur Ferrier-drawn cartoon strip that appeared in the News of the World back in the 1940s.

So what connects the two?

The answer is Eileen Bennett. This lady here...

Eileen Bennett was a West End actress who appeared as a actress in a number of mostly lighthearted films in the late 1930s and early 1940s, amongst them Q Planes starring Laurence Olivier and Back-Room Boy starring Arthur Askey before earning more substantial roles opposite George Formby in Much Too Shy (1942, available on YouTube) and with Stewart Granger in Thursday's Child (1943). She played the young female lead in Arsenic and Old Lace at the Strand Theatre in the West End for two years and also had major roles in over a dozen BBC radio plays and several dramas in the early days of BBC Television.

She was also the model for Sally in Arthur Ferrier's famous News of the World strip, as can be seen in the Pathe newsreel below, although she gave up modelling not long after she graduated from RADA.

Eileen Bennett was born in London in 8 July 1920 and married Col. Thomas West Hammond Jr. in July 1945. Hammond, born in San Rafael, CA, on 1 June 1908, was a career soldier, who had graduated from West Point Military Academy. He had previously been married to Jane Allen Runyon in 1937 and had one son, Thomas West Hammond, born in 1942, before his wife died in 1943.

Thomas and Eileen had two children, David (born in Paris, 7 October 1946) and Nicholas (born in Washington, DC, 15 May 1950). The family moved to Europe in around 1956 and, after his mother took him to see My Fair Lady at a London theatre in 1959, young Nicholas decided that he, too, wanted to become an actor. And he did. The family moved back to America when he was 10 and within a couple of years he began appearing on TV and had a small role in Lord of the Flies. In 1965 he had his biggest break when he played Friedrich, the eldest of the von Trapp children, in The Sound of Music.

And twelve years later he played Peter Parker/Spider-Man in The Amazing Spider-Man TV series. And that, dear readers, is the link: the actress who modeled for Sally is the mother of the actor who played Spider-Man.

(* My thanks to Nicholas for additional details of his mother's acting career.)

L. Ashwell Wood - Behind the Scenes part 2

L Ashwell Wood's King George V Class Battleship

by Jeremy Briggs

As a follow up to the piece on Eagle artist Leslie Ashwell Wood's preliminary pencil drawing of the 6 Pounder anti-tank gun of World War Two, we have a further preliminary pencil sketch of his dating from the same period of a King George V Class battleship of the Royal Navy. Unlike the 6 Pounder prelim, which was used for an explanatory illustration, this battleship prelim shows off the type of artwork that Wood is best known for, the cutaway.

The King George V Class of battleship consisted of five ships commissioned between 1940 and 1942 - HMS King George V, HMS Prince of Wales, HMS Duke of York, HMS Howe and HMS Anson. While HMS Prince of Wales was lost, along with the battlecruiser HMS Repulse, when they were attacked by Japanese aircraft near Singapore in December 1941, the four other ships of the class survived the Second World War despite tangling with such famous German opponents as the Bismarck and the Scharnhorst.

The prelim here was used to create the cutaway painting of King George V Class battleship published in the 1943 Odhams hardback book Britain's Glorious Navy. For the painting, Wood added top and side plan views of the ship in the rectangular frame in the top right of the prelim. Since battleships of the time would have had destroyer escorts, Wood also added a destroyer on the left side of the image.

This is the point at which the story of this particular prelim would normally end however there is an unexpected addendum to this cutaway.

As Steve discovered when he did his first Bear Alley piece on Leslie Ashwell Wood, the National Archives holds five of his art boards, four black and white explanatory paintings of army tactics and one full colour painting. That full colour painting is of a King George V Class battleship and is also based on this prelim. In this case the painting is not a cutaway and shows the ship firing with its A Turret guns, meaning that they are not in the same position as the prelim.  Unlike in the printed cutaway, the destroyer escort is on the right side of the painting and this is also reflected on the prelim.

Also obvious in the painting and reflected in the prelim is a Fairey Seafox float plane. Battleships and other large capital shops of this period used float planes and flying boats as spotter aircraft for aiming their main guns accurately, so having a plane in the air whilst firing the A Turret guns would be accurate to life.

However the King George V class did not operate Fairey Seafox float planes, they used Supermarine Walrus flying boats. The aircraft on this class of battleship was launched from a compressed air catapult amidships and both the painting and the printed cutaway show an aircraft on the catapult. The colour painting has a Seafox pointing to the right while the black and white cutaway has a Walrus pointed to the left.

As can just about be seen the prelim also has the Walrus on the catapult as well as having something that neither of the completed versions have and that is an aircraft being launched, complete with motion lines to show its flight path. Indeed the prelim appears to have two versions of the Walrus launch, a very black one which may have been scribbled out and a much lighter one that is more difficult to see but which represents a launched Walrus flying boat (as shown in the lower photo) more accurately. Both sketches of the Walrus in the air have it right at the edge of the rectangular box of the plan view of the battleship. Perhaps Wood did not include it in the final version because he decided that there was not enough space to comfortably fit it in.

The Fairey Seafox float plane was an older aircraft type than the Supermarine Walrus and was not actually used on the King George V Class battleships which only ever carried Walrus flying boats. This suggests that at the time Wood created the painting he was not aware of the aircraft type to be fitted to the ship and therefore illustrated his best guess of aircraft based on what had been used on earlier Royal Navy warships. In addition to this, Wood illustrated the ship’s secondary gun turrets in the painting as the older square style with a open rear section while the cutaway’s secondary turrets are the more modern enclosed circular style that were actually fitted to the ships. This, in conjunction with the general lack of detail in the painting of the ship compared to the printed cutaway, suggests that Wood had much fewer reference sources to work from for the painting and therefore that the painting predates the cutaway.

In addition to the prelim having details from both the painting and the printed cutaway, it also displays the fact that Wood drew the bow of the ship, and its port anchor, twice. Whilst the length of the ship from bow to anchor is consistent in both final versions, the distance between the anchor and the deck breakwater in front of the A Turret is shorter on the cutaway than on the painting giving the ship in the painting a slightly longer forward section. Since the prelim has a number of different frames drawn around the main image the assumption can be made that the prelim was originally drawn for the painting with a certain ratio of length to height. When the prelim was updated and used for the cutaway in Britain’s Glorious Navy, the cutaway version needed to have a different ratio of length to height, one that was effective slightly shorter and Wood achieved this by simply shortening the bow of the ship. While this could be seen as a cheat, it was certainly an efficient use of the prelim by the artist.

We can date the cutaway to its 1943 publication in Britain's Wonderful Navy, although it is possible that it may have appeared earlier than that in Odhams' weekly magazine Modern Wonder/Modern World that Wood worked on before 1943. As for the painting it was at the very least prepared for some sort of print publication due to the position marks around its edge. However with no date on it, and apparently no record in the National Archives of its use, it is impossible to say where and when it was published.

That is something that we still have to discover.

L. Ashwell Wood - Behind the Scenes part 1

L Ashwell Wood’s 6 Pounder Anti-Tank Gun

by Jeremy Briggs

Leslie Ashwell Wood is an artist most associated with one publication and one style of illustration as he produced nearly two thirds of the almost 1000 cutaway illustrations that appeared in Eagle comic during the 1950s and 1960s and which made him the title’s longest serving artist. His work ran throughout the entire run of original Eagle from the first issue dated 14 April 1950 to the penultimate issue dated 19 April 1969 and even in those issues that showed images that were not technically cutaways, his accuracy invariably still made his paintings of educational value. Eagle published several photos of Wood throughout its run with the first appearing in the first anniversary issue of the comic, which featured a selection of small circular photos of some of the comic’s artists.

Yet despite his enormous output for Eagle, Wood also worked for other publications including Modern Wonder magazine in the late 1930s and early 1940s, a series of hardback books for Odhams during the 1940s and, after Eagle, a series of small books entitled Inside Information published by Benwig on the cusp of the 1970s. Since the National Archives hold examples of his work it is fair to assume that at some point he also worked for the Ministry Of Information as many other artists did during the Second World War.

Wood has been covered in Bear Alley before when Steve went to some length to try to discover his date of birth and also presented a list of the books that featured his illustrations. That list included the various Odhams hardbacks that he worked on including the series of related books on warfare published between 1940 and 1944 that included Britain's Wonderful Fighting Forces, Britain's Modern Army, Britain's Wonderful Air Force, Britain's Glorious Navy and Britain's Merchant Navy. These books all featured illustrations by Wood as well as other artists to complement their black and white photographs. The last of the warfare books was published in 1944 and was entitled Warfare Today with the sub-title 'How Modern Battles are Planned and Fought on Land, at Sea and in the Air'. This 256 page book featured sections on all three armed services and reused some of what had already been published in previous titles. The book is credited to Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon, Major-General J. F. C. Fuller and Air Marshal Sir Patrick Playfair as joint-editors and between them they brought many decades of service experience in the Royal Navy, British Army and Royal Air Force.

There is a selection of mainly double page illustrations by Wood in Warfare Today including illustrations of the 25-Pounder field gun in the Army section and a cutaway of an Illustrious Class aircraft carrier in the Royal Navy section, a revised version of the illustration which originally featured in Britain's Glorious Navy. The Army section also includes a double page illustration of the Ordnance Quick-Firing 6-Pounder 7 Cwt, a 57mm towed anti-tank weapon introduced in 1942 and commonly referred to as the 6-Pounder, an illustration that had not appeared in any of the earlier books.

Recently a selection of Leslie Ashwell Wood’s preliminary pencil sketches have come to light, including work from Modern Wonder, the Odhams books and even Eagle. One of those pencil prelims, which were sketched on layout (tracing) paper to the full size of the final painted version, is for this explanatory illustration of the 6-Pounder.

While the final printed version in Warfare Today is 10 x 6¼ inches (approx 25 x 16cm), the prelim is a remarkable 25 x 15½ inches (approx 63 x 39cm) in size or “1½ up”. At this size it shows off some of the techniques that Wood used to create his final painting as well as some of the differences that he introduced between this original concept and the final printed version. The final version contains six main images of which the prelim contains five. Of these, the sections showing the gun on tow behind a lorry, the loading of the ammunition and the explanation of the sights, are all very similar to the final printed versions as can be seen below.

The pencil prelim of the gun’s breech, the rear of the barrel where the shell is loaded, shows the breech in both its open and closed positions in the one illustration. This saved Wood from drawing the breech section in pencil twice and when he transferred the sketch to the art board that he would paint on, he would have simply used the one pencil for the two final versions, omitting the appropriate sections as required.

The breech illustration also shows off best the one major difference in the pencil prelim and the final version. In the pencils above the breech opening there is a raised metal section with a hole through it that is apparent in other parts of the pencils as well but which the final version does not have. It may be a hoist ring for lifting the gun or for tying down the barrel. Viewing photographs of actual 6 Pounder guns show that some of them have this whilst others do not which suggests that at some point during the weapon’s production run it was either removed from or added to the design. Its disappearance on the final version could well have been an editorial decision although the one photo of a 6 Pounder in Warfare Today shows a gun with it.

The final major image is that of the gun in its firing position. While the pencil layout is near identical to the final version it shows that Wood originally included an image of a soldier standing beside the side view of the gun which gives a good indication of its size. Strangely the figure has been removed from the final version meaning that the size of the weapon is less easy to determine. Also evident, although less so, is that he also included sketchy figures of the gun aimer and the gun loader in the same side view section and there is also a very sketchy outline of a further man beside the left tyre of the gun in the main section, a figure that would have distracted from the final image. The pencil prelim also has more detail of the gun’s 30 inch long recoil area which in the printed version is shown as a simple dotted outline.

The final section of the printed version shows a front view of the gun looking straight down the barrel with the gun carriage slightly traversed. Interestingly while Wood left room on the prelim for this image he did not draw it and there is no evidence on the layout paper of it being sketched and rubbed out or a separate section glued down which has since disappeared. Perhaps the explanation of its omission is that since the main part of the image is a view directly down the gun barrel, Wood considered it such an easy image that he did not feel he need to do a prelim and so sketched it directly onto the art board.

So how did Wood get his pencils and final paintings so accurate? We know from issues of Eagle that before working on the comic he had been a draughtsman in an aircraft company. As a trained technical illustrator it would have been his job to produced engineering drawings, commonly referred to as blueprints, for the many components that made up any given aircraft. He was able to transfer that skill to his illustrations of technical subjects and while it may be going to far to suggest that he had engineering drawings of each of his subjects, one can only assume that he either had excellent reference photographs of them or was able to see them in real life to make notes and detailed sketches.

The discovery of some of Leslie Ashwell Wood’s original preliminary pencil layouts gives us a little more information on how he created these excellent paintings which, nearly 70 years later, still impress with both their accuracy of detail and the simplicity with which they explain their subject matter.

Comic Cuts - 3 December 2010

Monday

Thursday

I think I've finally got over this cold. At least, that's what I told my mum, so it looks like I'm over that desperate-need-for-sympathy stage which all men go through during illness. Or is that just me? Anyway, it's a good sign. Mind you, I've still got a cough, although that could just be a smoky office and a lack of fresh air due to the freezing cold weather a few feet away. Thankfully there's a window between me and the snow, so I get the benefit of it looking all Christmassy without the biting cold wind chilling my bones. Mind you, we are discovering (to our discomfort) that the new house has a few gaps that are going to need filling or covering over with draught excluders.

I've spent the week working full tilt on a new project that I hope will be a nice surprise when it's finally revealed. If everything goes to plan, I should have news fairly shortly and something to show for my efforts in January.

Alastair Crompton's Tomorrow Revisited was given its official launch at The Chris Beetles Gallery, St. James's, London, on Tuesday 30 November 2010 and a good time was had by all. Me? I was hibernating at home and missed all the fun. Damn this cold. Alastair had copies of the book hot off the presses and copies should be shortly winging their way to people who preordered via the PS Publishing website.

The latest batch of book cover scans I've produced for the Look and Learn picture library are now up on the website and bring the total to over 700 images. I'm working on the next batch already, although I'm not going to make the 1000 mark I'd hoped to before the year's out. Mind you, when I set the target I didn't know I was going to be moving house, so I don't think I'm doing too badly.

Incidentally, the problem at Amazon relating to the latest edition of Charley's War from Titan I mentioned last week seems to have resolved itself.

New out this week: the Dicionario Universal da Banda Desenhada prequeno lexico dislexico by Leonard De Sa, a glossery of terms relating to comics. Leonard kindly sent me a copy as I apparently helped out enough to make it into the acknowledgments. I've yet to figure out how and where - or when, come to think of it - but it looks like an interesting book despite my (no doubt tiny) involvement. The only problem: it's in Portuguese and my language skills aren't up to much beyond recognising a few words here and there. Leonard is an expert on the history of American and European comics and if you fancy expanding your knowledge of both in a handy dictionary format, this is your chance. You can find out more about the book here (and here's a Google translation).

Over the weekend I've a couple of articles by Jeremy Briggs based around some preliminary artwork produced by L. Ashwell Wood so make sure you're here for that as it's a unique chance to see how he developed a painting. Next week... I'm still figuring that out. I'll hopefully be able to sort out a strip over the weekend.

Today's random scan... Brian Bolland box art for the Judge Dredd board game which was produced by Games Workshop back in 1982. The game was created by Ian Livingstone and was for 2-6 players. If I can find some spare time over Christmas I might get a few friends round and see what it's like to play.