More From The Penny Dreadfuls

Beyond the mists of time, back to the era of the nineteenth century we go spinning past flapping calendar pages till we hit 1905 and  "The First Rate Boy's Paper" which was one of a number of publications aimed at impressionable youths who would often club together so that they could pool their third farthings (12 of these equaling 1 old penny) to buy a copy and share it between them.

These papers which serialized lurid tales of characters such as Spring Heeled Jack and the early Sexton Blake, along with U.S. imports which threatened to lead the nation's youth even further astray by treating them to the tales of such American desperados as Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill Cody, were of such concern that high minded commentators (they have always been with us it seems) sought ways to counter the threat.

Publisher Alfred Harmsworth much in the manner of a clerical gentleman some fifty years later, came up with the idea of presenting youngsters with tales of an uplifting and enlightening nature and undercut the Penny Dreadfuls by selling his papers for a ha'penny. Things went well to begin with but as the writers ran out of inspiration and the readership ran out of steam, Harmsworth's high minded publications became noticeably less high minded. As A.A. Milne somewhat dryly observed; "Harmsworth killed the penny dreadful by the simple process of producing the ha'penny dreadfuller."

Images supplied by the inimitable (and very self effacing) Malcolm Norton.

Ian Kennedy, Dan Dare and the 'Squamous Monster"

Amazing or what? Courtesy of Phil Rushton who has supplied this beautifully restored scan here is the image he referred to as the "Squamous Monster".

And her courtesy of David Slinn is a sample page of Ian Kennedy's take on Dan Dare. Lightly pencilled underdrawing with transparent glazes of ink

- or is it acrylic???

Top image definitely acrylic.

All images © IPC Media 2011

More Kennedy Magic From the World of Sci-Fi.

Courtesy of legendary gopher and connoisseur of comic art (especially of the Kennedy variety) Mr Malcolm Norton are some more of those now legendary Eagle covers by none other than Ian Kennedy.

It doesn't get much better than this:

images © IPC Media 2011

The McLoughlin Project - Your Help is Needed!

Glorious weather outside and I hope you are all enjoying the lovely weekend. May the sun shine on you all whichever corner of the earth you are reading this from.

Anyway to business, as well as the deadlines from hell, I also have the publisher from hell to contend with. That dynamo of enterprise and connoisseur of comic art hath bended my ear of late about the resurrection of an idea that I was working on this time last year, which was quite simply to update and reformat the excellent booklet that David Ashford and Denis McLoughlin produced in 1994 titled The Hardboiled Art of Denis McLoughlin.


This idea was put on the back burner when the Wulf project began to take shape - only because I just couldn't afford to take a whole year off to wholeheartedly devote myself to two book projects as well as Cloud 109 (it still lives!).

My task vis a vis the Mcloughlin book is, as stated previously - editing and reformatting, but it also includes such fun tasks as designing the thing so that it has a real dynamic. The sort of book that you pick up and it just welcomes you in, which in the case of Denis McLoughlin is relatively easy to achieve as his work at it's best is just totally seductive.

The book will be a lot less expensive than the recent Wulf the Briton extravaganza, quite simply because the work we are showcasing is relatively small scale and even Denis McLoughlin's Boardman hardbacks are all A5 size, so we are not immediately into the economies of scale dictated  by attempting a same size reprint of a UK broadsheet comic. Consequently this book will be about the size of the Fleetway Indexes and will not be nearly as expensive to produce as the Wulf book.

But, and this dear reader is where you come in, my work also includes sourcing really amazing imagery which we can use to add further visual flair to this illustrative extravaganza. What I really need at the moment is (ideally high grade) material to source, particularly in the case of the Boardman paperbacks and hardback hard boiled fiction. We have some but we need more and if you can help out this would be great. So if by any chance you do have any material of this nature which you can scan, do let me know and also if you have, by some miracle McLoughlin original artwork for the Boardman Hardboiled fiction covers we would be forever in your debt.

In fact any original cover and color artwork would be great, we have some but more would be wonderful.

I have set up a Flickr gallery devoted to Denis McLoughlin's "Noir" covers which is located here

And here as an appetizer are two of the early try out covers for this book, plus a screenshot of a classic McLoughlin cover being reworked to accommodate the new type. McLoughlin actually painted his lettering straight onto the artwork, so I am reluctantly having to commit the ultimate sacrilege by repainting in Photoshop the areas previously occupied by the type face and endeavor to replicate both the McLoughlin style as well as all the printing artifacts, such as grain and off register effects.

Dave Garratt - Steam Powered Sci-Fi with Ian Kennedy

Picture your overworked and hyper stressed bog meister falling on his knees with gratitude as he receives yet another offering from one of our regular visitors - none other than Mr Phil Rushton, in answer to the inevitable questions posed by his comment on yesterday's posting by mentioning Ian Kennedy's earlier sci-fi outing Dave Garratt.

Yup in the dim and distant 1950's when the height of modern age communications was the Dan Dare radio set, or more prosaically two tin cans and an interconnecting length of string and Ian Kennedy was signing himself Chas, boys used to thrill to space age adventures of this ilk...

From Collin's Boy's Annual circa 1955 (ish)

Definite hints of Ron Turner in some of these pieces wouldn't you say???

And from 1962 another example of early Kennedy sci-fi art.

Dan Dare Revisited - Ian Kennedy's Take on a UK Classic

Courtesy of Malcolm Norton here are some of Ian Kennedy's stupendous cover artworks for the Eagle Comic of the 1980's. The comic was launched with Gerry Embleton initially handling the drawing chores for Dan Dare, the rest of the comic being largely based on fumetti strips. Fumetti which in this context refers to photo based comic strips was very popular in European comics from the 1960's onwards and in the U.S. attracted the attention of James Warren who first employed it in the Harvey Kurtzman edited Help magazine as well as adaptations of horror films in his one off magazines Horror of Beach Party, The Mole Men and Curse of Frankenstein/ Horror of Dracula.

Gerry's stint on Dan Dare was however short lived and the man that picked up the reins was the ever dependable Ian Kennedy.

So here without further ado are some of those covers.

Images © IPC Media 2011

Embleton At The Court of King Arthur

Apropos of my previous posting, work is progressing on my tree-house, but ever so slowly and my local gentleman's outfitters are selling trilbys with feathers a la Count Arthur Strong, fedoras are conspicuous by their absence.

But what the hell, here following on from John Wigman's excellent post on Steve Holland's Bear Alley is the complete sequence of artworks for a Playhour adaptation of King Arthur he produced prior to Wulf the Briton. I was under the impression that the adaptation only spanned three weeks, I was wrong it was in fact five weeks and shows a much more stylized treatment than he would eventually employ on Wulf.

Ron Embleton did say of Wulf  that it could have been a lot more stylized than it eventually became, and aside from a lightness of content aimed at a much more juvenile market than Wulf was catering for,  in the pages of King Arthur you can get a hint of the much tighter and more decorative handling of figure work which was also apparent during the first few weeks of Wulf the Briton before the style that dominated his handling of the strip eventually evolved in all it's power and majesty.

All images © Look and Learn 2011