In Review: Eagles Over The Western Front Volume 3

Steve Holland's Bear Alley Books brings the World War One story of Royal Flying Corps pilot Harry Hawkes to a conclusion in Eagles Over The Western Front Volume 3.

It is 1917 and America has entered the war but for the pilots of No 2 Camel Squadron little has changed and the Red Baron is still their mortal enemy. A talking parrot, that has already visited the Germans and the French, joins Harry and his colleagues with its repetition of phrases getting them into trouble with their superiors before it finally reveals the location of a hidden German force. Things turn dangerous for Entwhistle as his younger brother, the black sheep of the family, joins the squadron and Entwhistle himself is put up on charges as he tries to prevent his brother's schemes. Harry, Entwhistle and Pootle all take part is a mission to land a British spy near Berlin using a British Handley Page Type O/400 heavy bomber but, when the spy breaks his ankle on landing, it is Harry and Pootle that must meet his contact in a small Berlin cafe.

Eagles, originally published in Look and Learn magazine between 1971 and 1973, was written by the highly experienced comics writer and editor Michael Butterworth, who was also writing The Trigan Empire for Look and Learn at the same time, and illustrator Bill Lacey. The previous volume ran a detained feature on Butterworth's work and in this final volume the feature is on Lacey. This takes in his career from Mickey Mouse Weekly in the 1950s through to work for DC Thomson in the 1980s in Buddy, via titles as diverse as Super Detective Library, Tiger, Buster and Valiant.

As with the previous two volumes, Butterworth mixes shorter and longer stories which means that the rhythm of the book never gets predictable while Lacey's artwork remains as clear and as remarkably detailed as before. His depictions of the biplanes are accurate and dynamic while his humour can be seen with his depiction of the invariably hungry Pootle.

The volume offers multiple stories from the humorous to the serious and does not shy away from the fact that this is war and people die, both in the mud on the ground and, with no parachutes, in their burning aeroplanes. The one constant is the continual presence of Manfred Von Richthofen, the Red Baron, and his deadly Flying Circus whether at a distance as bullet spitting aircraft or when the characters meet in person as they do on several occasions. Indeed Eagles Over The Western Front as a comic strip is so involved with the Red Baron that the last story concludes on 21 April 1918, the day Richthofen was shot down and killed.

For most of its readers Look and Learn was a parental-purchase magazine due to its cost and, while parents bought it for its educational value, most of its child readers would have started each issue by reading the comic strips before moving onto the factual features. Strips of the quality of Eagles Over The Western Front were one of the reasons that they were more than happy to keep reading Look and Learn week after week.

• There are more details on Eagles Over The Western Front Volume 3, as well as ordering information, on the Bear Alley Books blog.

• The downthetubes reviews of the previous volumes are here and here.

In Review: Eagles Over The Western Front Volume 2

Bear Alley Books continue their Eagles Over The Western Front reprints from Look and Learn magazine with the second of three volumes that will combine into the entire run of the strip written by Trigan Empire's Mike Butterworth with black and white artwork by Bill Lacey and originally printed between 1971 to 1973. Set in France during the later years of World War I, the series relates the tales of Royal Flying Corps pilot Harry Hawkes as he fights the Germans in a series of improving biplane fighters.

As in the previous volume the stories range from short to long, tongue-in-cheek to deadly serious. The book begins in fun form with Harry travelling from France to London to be bequeathed a St Bernard in a relative's will, a dog which causes chaos at the airbase trying to get into the planes, and then is apparently killed by German shelling which means that Harry flies a bombing raid against the German gun emplacement only to find the dog safe and well on his return - a story that is all told in six pages. Perhaps the most interesting story of this volume is the rather longer tale of a famous music hall entertainer to signs up for the RFC and proves popular in the squadron due to his singing, however he is a considerably better singer than fighter pilot as is demonstrated when he enters the gun-sights of the feared Red Baron.

Whatever they are about, Butterworth's stories are fast paced and action packed and never repetitive as our hero's friends and colleagues come and go as he moves between squadrons and the series timeline progresses as he flies the newer and better planes that are being supplied to the RFC against differing German opposition. The story rarely feels confined by the original two pages per week publication rate from Look and Learn and Bill Lacey's artwork remains consistently good with a remarkable amount of detail in each panel.

Unsurprisingly for a Steve Holland reprint book there is a feature at the beginning and after last volume's factual background to the war and the RFC, this volume's feature is rather more comics based with a article on writer Mike Butterworth. This takes the reader from Butterworth's abortive attempts to sell Avery scales through to his novel writing via the creation of various notable British comics characters such as Battler Britton and Jet-Ace Logan, his work as editor of comic titles as diverse as Playhour, Honey and Ranger, and of course his creation and long term writing of Look and Learn's best remembered and most loved strip, The Trigan Empire. The book also has a short feature on the original artwork that much of the pages are reproduced from and which, unusually, shows an alternate frame from one of the pages that artist Bill Lacey had to redraw prior to publication.

With a wraparound cover featuring World War One biplane combat by Wilf Hardy, Eagles Of The Western Front Volume 2 continues pilot Harry Hawkes' story and while, forty years on from its creation, its format and pacing are very different to modern comics, it shows just how good weekly British comic strips were be when a skilled writer was teamed with an enthusiastic artist.

• There are more details of the Eagles Over The Western Front books as well as ordering details on the Bear Alley Books blog.

• You can read early parts of Eagles Over The Western Front on the Bear Alley blog.

In Review: Eagles Over The Western Front Volume 1

Forty years ago the weekly magazine Look and Learn was a parental purchase in many British households as parents saw its articles as educational while its younger readers saw its comic strips, including the now legendary Trigan Empire, as exciting. Many of those strips maintained the publication's educational remit by being adaptations of classic novels but 1971 saw the start of a aviation themed, Great War based strip entitled Eagles Over The Western Front written by Trigan Empire's Michael Butterworth and artist Bill Lacey.

Schoolboy Harry Hawkes was too young to volunteer for the military at the outbreak of World War One but is called up for the Royal Flying Corps by Easter 1915. Having learnt to fly the flimsy biplanes of the time, he is initially posted to France with his friend Entwistle to fly unarmed reconnaissance sorties over the front lines. There he encounters the world's first true fighter plane, the German Fokker E1, which is taking its toll on British pilots. By winter 1915 he is flying DH2 fighters as the British begin to take the fight back to the Germans.

The 80 page book begins with the nine single weekly pages from July and August 1971 before moving on to its regular two pages pages per week. Unlike other strips of the time the stories do not follow a discernible pattern of (say) 10 pages per story and so there are both long stories and short stories in the mix. This means that Eagles never gets into a rhythm with the reader knowing that a story is about to finish because of the number of pages that he has read and some of the stories end very abruptly, as they would have in reality, with the death of a main character.

While you would expect a comic strip about a fighter pilot to involve our hero jumping in his plane and flying off to shoot down many of the enemy before returning safely home, in Eagles, especially in the early stories, the reason for our hero not to make it back to base is more often because of mechanical failure of the aircraft he is flying rather than any enemy action against him. As for shooting down the enemy, it is a plot point in at least two of the stories in Volume 1 that Harry has not actually shot down a single German plane despite be considered a good pilot. It all makes for an ongoing story that is interesting in its non-conformity to the expected rules of an aviation comic strip and it certainly makes the reader think about the frailty of the planes that RFC pilots were flying back then without the safety of parachutes.

The book begins with a six page feature article setting the scene of both the beginnings of the Royal Flying Corps and the Great War itself. In the interests of transparency Bear Alley Books publisher Steve Holland asked me, as the resident aviation enthusiast, to proof read an earlier version of this article for accuracy and it was indeed accurate giving more than enough background for readers to appreciate the subtleties of what the characters were experiencing in those early years of the war before the conflict settled into the more familiar format of trench warfare. Indeed my main comment then was that the article focused on the historical side of the comic strip rather than on its creators but with Volumes 2 and 3 to come in June and July 2011, Steve assured me that both Butterworth and Lacey would each receive feature articles in them. Rather than reusing frames from the story, Steve uses WWI aviation illustrations from Look and Learn painted by Wilf Hardy to liberally illustrate the feature while the book's cover is a dynamic WWI scene featuring Brisfit fighters painted by Graham Coton since Bill Lacy was never given the chance to illustrate Eagles for the cover of the weekly magazine.

Eagles Over The Western Front Volume 1 makes for an interesting and sometimes thoughtful read without missing out on the excitement or entertainment that one would expect of a good comic strip of its era. With more than half of all the pages in this book and its two sequels being scanned from the original art boards, the artwork quality is as good as it can possibly get and shows that Bear Alley Books can give well established companies, that are also reprinting similar B&W British comic strips from the era, a run for their money.

There are more details of Eagles Over The Western Front Volume 1 on the Bear Alley Books blog including how to purchase it.

You can read part of Eagles Over The Western Front on the Bear Alley blog.