Latest Issue Of Eagle Times Now Available

L Ashwell Wood was Eagle's premier cutaway artist providing over 600 different painted cutaways for the weekly comic between 1950 and 1969. While some of these paintings have been reused in the recent Eagle reprint books published by Orion to date none of Wood's original pencils for these Eagle cutaways have ever been published.

Earlier this year downthetubes' Jeremy Briggs discovered the pencils for L Ashwell Wood's cutaway of the Royal Navy destroyer HMS St Kitts which was published in Eagle Vol 1 No 46 dated 23 February 1951. These pencils are published for the first time, alongside the final version of the cutaway as printed in Eagle, as an A3 centrespread in the new issue of Eagle Times. In addition to the centrespread, Jeremy supplies a detailed article on L Ashwell Wood's nineteen year career with Eagle comic.

Amongst other features in this new issue of Britain's longest running comics fanzine are the first part of A Look at Luck examining Eagle's Luck of the Legion, the French Foreign Legion strip written by Geoffrey Bond and drawn by Martin Aitchison, an examination of the real XCH-4 hydrofoil which inspired Frank Hampson's hydrofoil designs in the Dan Dare story The Man From Nowhere, and writer Alan Vince's memories of working for David Hunt, the first editor of new Eagle in the 1980s.

There are more details about Eagle Times Volume 24 Number 3 on the Eagle Times Blog.

An annual subscription to Eagle Times magazine, which is published four times per year, is via membership to the Eagle Society. Details of how to subscribe are also on the Eagle Times Blog.

Battleships By L Ashwell Wood

It is no secret that the team here on downthetubes are all fans of Eagle comic with John Freeman editing Titan's Dan Dare and Bible Stories reprint books, Jeremy Briggs and Richard Sheaf writing for Eagle Times while Ian Wheeler was the editor of the still missed Eagle Flies Again zine.

Original Eagle's longest serving artist was Leslie Ashwell Wood who is best known for his detailed cutaway paintings that were in around two thirds of all the issues of Eagle published between 1950 and 1969. Wood died in 1973 before Eagle fandom had a chance to talk to him and this has left many questions about this career unanswered.

Recently a selection of his preliminary pencil sketches for various cutaways and other explanatory paintings have come to light and Jeremy Briggs has taken the opportunity to examine these over on Steve Holland's Bear Alley blog. The latest of these prelims is for a King George V Class battleship of the Royal Navy, the type of ship that fought battles again the Bismarck and Scharnhorst in the Atlantic during World War Two. Jeremy compares the seventy year old prelim to its published version and is able to directly link it to a painting by Wood that is held in the UK's National Archives.

There are more details of the battleship pencil prelim by Leslie Ashwell Wood on Bear Alley.