In Review: Ron Turner's "Space Ace"

Out: Now
Publisher: John Lawrence
Originally published by Atlas Publishing & Distributing Co. Ltd

The Magazine: Four vintage stories from the pages of Lone Star Magazine and Lone Star Annual featuring Space Ace.

"Space Ace was a labour of love for Ron," says John Lawrence, who was Ron's agent, in his introduction to this collection. "It attracted possibly the lowest page rate ever compared to much of his other work, but it was free from any editorial constraints ... His enjoyment shines through in the four stories I've selected... These stories originally appeared in black and white, but now, for this publication, Ron's marvellous artwork has been enhanced by the superb colouring of John Ridgway, an artist absolutely in tune with Ron's own colouring sensibilities."

The Review: While Ron Turner wasn't the first artist to work on Space Ace, a character first appearing in Lone Star but who later gained his own title in the 1950s, published by Atlas, he made the character his own during his time on the strip.

(The strip was taken over by the Selecciones Ilustradas agency on his departure - Turner was to go on to drawing many covers for magazines such as Practical Mechanics, drawing The Daleks for TV Century 21 and more, right up until his death in 1998).

The central character was Ace Hart, sheriff of Tarrant County Texas, who is struck by a meteorite and gains immunity to radioactivity. He becomes Space Ace, Space Squadron Commander, captaining the new spaceship LS1, aided by a crew that at one point included an inventor and a monkey but, by the time of the strips in this volume, is partnered only by Ace's NCO, Sergeant Bill Crag.

Produced by John Lawrence, this first volume of Space Ace tales presents four complete stories from Lone Star Magazine and Lone Star Annual. (Together with Philip Harbottle John created Nick Hazard: Interstellar Agent in the 1990s, which was illustrated by Ron in black and white originally, but more recently was also re-coloured and re-formatted, also by John Ridgway).

The Space Ace strips were drawn in the early 1950s - a period in which Turner also drew Rick Random - Space Detective for Fleetway's Super Detective Library. While Rick Random is perhaps better known - and there too, Turner gave that strip a distinctive look - Space Ace has a similar quality, enhanced further in this edition by John Ridgway's tremedous work on colouring the stories.

While the stories themselves are positively quaint in comparison with today's SF – humanoid Martians rubbing shoulders with other bipedal aliens as well as humans – there's no disputing Turner's flair for designing stylish future vehicles and buildings.

This 40-page collection may have a high cover price but it's a price on a par with similar short-run comic magazines such as Spaceship Away and definitely something fans of Ron's work should be tracking down.

John Lawrence has produced this first Space Ace as a non-profit publication, purely for the love of Ron Turner’s work. The number of copies sold that will determine whether or not there are future volumes published.

• Space Ace: Volume 1 costs £8.95 including p&p. To order, send John a cheque (John Lawrence, 39 Carterweys, Dunstable, Bedfordhire LU5 4RB) or pay via PayPal (larryjohn.21 AT tiscali.co.uk).

• Ron Turner Cover Collection: www.flickr.com/photos/gems_from_the_collection/sets/72157600000117243/

Spaceship Away 28 Available In Time For Christmas

Spaceship Away, the A4, full colour glossy magazine that covers original Dan Dare as well as a selection of other classic strips, has released issue 28 in time for Christmas.

Priced at £7.95, including UK postage, the 44 page issue features a new Marooned on Mercury cover from original 1950s Dan Dare artist Don Harley as well as a special one off Christmas Dan Dare story entitled The Tannenbaum Caper in which Eagle's Dan Dare and the Daily Express' Jeff Hawke meet for the first time. This fully licensed strip was written by Jeff Hawke creator Sydney Jordan and illustrated by Don Harley.

The other comic strips in the issue include the latest episode of the Dan Dare story Parsecular Tales written and drawn by Tim Booth, the continuing reprint of the Jet Morgan/Journey Into Space strip Shadow Over Britain! from Express Weekly illustrated by Ferdinando Tacconi, a Ron Turner strip The World That Dissolved published for the first time in colour, and the continuing reprint of the Garth story Finality Factor from the Daily Mirror also published in colour for the first time.

Spaceship Away continues its features on little known Dan Dare spin-offs with a piece on the pilot episode for a live action Dan Dare TV series featuring Robert Bathurst as Dan and Geoffrey Hughes as Digby. Other features include an appreciation of artist Ferdinando Tacconi, who passed away in 2006 along with a tribute to him from Jeff Hawke's Sydney Jordan, a career spanning interview with Sydney himself, and a piece on that other 1950s comic strip spaceman Swift Morgan whose adventures were illustrated by Denis McLoughlin.

The centrespread of the issue is a special preview of the new cutaway by Graham Bleathman of the J Series Space Station from the original Dan Dare strip in 1950s Eagle which will be featured in the Dan Dare Spacefleet Operations Manual due to be published by Haynes in 2013.

There are more details of Spaceship Away on the Spaceship Away website.

Spaceship Away 27 on sale now

Issue 27 of the Eagle-inspired comic magazine Spaceship Away is available now, this time with a background theme drawing on the Dan Dare story The Red Moon, featuring a number of paintings relating to that story from both Don Harley and Tim Booth.

Most importantly, aside from ne Dan Dare and other comic strips, the issue pays tribute to, and has last words from artist Bruce Cornwell, who sadly passed away earlier this year.

The strip line up is as follows:

• "Dan Dare: Parsecular Tales" by Tim Booth - part four of an epic new adventure continuing the original Dan Dare legend
• "Shadow over Britain", a Journey into Space story by Charles Chilton, based on the 1950s radio show
• “Thoughts That Kill” by Ron Turner, coloured by Martin Baines, a short one off story of the danges of telepathic civillisation
  
• "Dan Dare: Amberlint" (Part One) written and drawn by Nick Spender, an ex-student of Dan Dare's original creator Frank Hampson
• "Garth: Finality Factor" (Part Four) by Jim Edgar and John Allard, art by Martin Asbury

Alongside tributes to Bruce Cornwell, features this issue include 

• ‘Diego Valor’: downthetubes contributor Jeremy Briggs reveals the history of a Spanish spin off of Dan Dare.
  
• Graham Bleathman has produced a cutaway of Dan’s apartment, based on Eagle published frames and notes by Greta Tomlinson, who was a member of the strip's original studio
  

Looking ahead, the editorial team tell us they have some amazing items coming up in our autumn issue, including a Jeff Hawke / Dan Dare strip by Sydney Jordan and Don Harley. Issue 28 is due in November.

- To get Spaceship Away delivered to your door, head over to the official website: http://spaceshipaway.org.uk

Vintage British Star Trek pages sold on eBay

Two pages of vintage Star Trek art by veteran British comic artist John Stokes created for British publication have just been sold on eBay.

Published in August 1972 in Valiant and TV21, John Stokes was one of several artists to work on the property, which first featured in the weekly comic Joe 90: Top Secret in January 1969, six months before the TV show itself began to air in the UK on BBC1, coinciding with the first moon landing.

Star Trek transferred to TV21 when the two titles merged in September 1969, becoming TV21 and Joe 90.

TV21, a pale shadow of its former 1960s self, was eventually merged with Valiant in late 1971, with Star Trek one of the strips that survived the merger.

Artists who worked on the strip - which proved an instant hit from its first appearance in Joe 90 - included Harry Lindfield, Mike Noble, Ron Turner, Harold Johns, Carlos Pino and Vicente Alcazar and, finally, John Stokes, who drew 13 untitled stories in total.

The strip appeared in colour, his art often falling prey to the vagaries of Valiant's letterpress printing, running until 29 December 1973.

This artwork was part of a huge deal between IPC and collector Peter Hansen and Blase Books, run by Phil Clark, regularly offer items via eBay, sold as from the Peter Hansen Five Star IPC Archive Collection.

While the British Star Trek comic is riddled with continuity errors, especially in early stories where the artists and writers had no idea of the show's format or how its vehicles looked, aside from what we can only assume would have been a few reference photographs, there is still plenty of interest in this curious spin-off from the hit SF franchise, which included one of the first attempts to visualize the Romulan homeworld and a story set on Earth - a setting never realized on the original TV series itself.

Perhaps there may yet be interest in a print collection of the material at some point.

• Written by pop-culture historian Alan J. Porter, author of the bestselling James Bond: The History of the Illustrated 007, Star Trek: A Comic Book History, published last year, should be of interest to people interested in the story above, offering a complete history of the Star Trek universe in comic books and newspaper strips all over the world.

It features nine information-packed chapters detailing the history of Star Trek in comic books and newspaper strips from the first Gold Key comic book, the British Star Trek strips to Marvel and DC's titles, and up to the present day. Covering all publications of the entire Star Trek universe it includes creator interviews, unpublished artwork, and a detailed checklist.

Garth Debuts in New Spaceship Away

The latest issue of the Dan Dare-inspired comics magazine Spaceship Away is on sale now via the official web site, and as previously mentioned, features the first installment of the Frank Bellamy Garth story The Bubble Man, beautifully re-coloured by John Ridgway.

Spaceship Away Part 19 - the title's sixth birthday issue - also includes articles on Frank Hampson's Epsom College days and the creation of comic strip Nick Hazard, drawn by Ron Turner, which also features in the comic magazine (also re-coloured by John Ridgway); plus new artwork from John M. Burns and all-new original Dan Dare comic strips - Green Nemesis and The Gates of Eden, both drawn by Tim Booth.

• To get the magazine delivered to your door, go straight to Spaceship Away Order Page

In Review: Great British Fantasy Comic Book Heroes

During the Second World War, with imported resources costing ships and lives, paper was one of the many things that came under the ration. In Britain comics were not a wartime priority and publishers had to cancel some titles while reducing the page count of the survivors. Paper rationing continued after the war throughout the 1940s and while the big publishers slowly built up the size and regularity of their remaining titles, some entrepreneurs saw a gap in the market for more comics printed on any paper that they could get their hands on. These became what were known as the Pirate Publishers, small time companies that put out often one-off comics with lurid titles such as Dynamic Thrills, Oh Boy Comic or Electroman.

Today these comics are incredibly rare and in this book Phil Clarke and Mike Higgs of Ugly Duckling Press have pulled together a wide selection of these 1940s and 1950s titles into one A4 size 464 page hardback under the title of Great British Fantasy Comic Book Heroes. The majority of the stories reprinted in this title feature superheros with some science fiction heroes added in a special “Sci-Fi Thrills” section towards the end. In amongst forgotten stories of TNT Tom, Ray Spede, Superstooge and Ned Nomad are some rather more familiar characters such as Space Ace, Swift Morgan and Marvelman and it is the more familiar characters and those illustrated by familiar names that are the draw in this book.

After a detailed ten page introductory article on the history of the titles and the characters that are reprinted in the book, it is the three Marvelman, Young Marvelman and Marvelman Family strips that are perhaps the ones that will raise the most curiosity today. Are they any good? "Holy Macaroni!", of course not - at least not to our adult eyes more used to reading Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman Marvelman stories illustrated by the likes of Alan Davis and Garry Leach. These old stories are childish and illogical but it has to be remembered that they were successful enough in their day for the character to be revamped for Warrior.

Indeed many of the stories reprinted are by artists that today would only be classed as producing bad fan art. It is too tempting to choose the worst art in the book with perhaps Hello Phantom Maid just pipping some others to the post.

However there are also early stories by some well known and respected names. Ron Turner is represented by three stories. Captain Sciento and Space Ace show typically stylish Turner art, with the Space Ace story being perhaps the best in the book, and a very early story entitled The Caverns Of Doom. Early Ron Embleton art is present in The Planet Of Doom and Captain Atom while Denis McLoughlin's detailed art is represented by Swift Morgan and The Beast From Outer Space.

However the one artist from that period and type of comic that deserves more attention is Norman Light. While his art style can be nicely summed up as "naive" it is also detailed and his spacecraft and other designs in Galactic Patrol have an enjoyable period feel to them. It would be good to see reprints of more stories written and illustrated by Light.

So while the contents may be hit and miss they do represent the Pirate Publisher comics of the time. The various stories have been digitally enhanced for the book and printed larger than the original comics and the reproduction is impressive. Of course there has to be a drawback and with this book it is the cost - £75 including UK postage. Collectors may consider buying such titles as Absolute V For Vendetta or the Captain Britain Omnibus for similar prices, titles that they will often already know, but for most this book will be a step in the dark.

So is it worth it? For those with a passing interest then probably not but for the collector it will be an impressive addition to their reference collection covering a barely known piece of British comics history and with only 100 copies of the book being printed it will remain almost as rare as the comics it reprints.

Great British Fantasy Comic Book Heroes is available for £75 from Blase Books, Hazelwood, Birchfield Road, Redditch, B97 6PU.

More details on ordering are available by e-mailing - blasebooksATaol.com.