In Review: Lion - King of Picture Story Papers

by Steve Holland
Published by Bear Alley Books at £24.99
Paperback 262 black and white pages


The Book: A history of the famous Lion weekly, which ran from 1952 until 1974. Steve Holland tells the story of Lion’s creation and development in four detailed chapters, before proceeding to catalogue all the strips, text stories and features in the weekly, the annuals and the Summer Specials, with publication dates and remarkably full details of writers and artists. The book is fully illustrated in black and white, with individual pages from every continuing strip in the weekly.

The Review (by Steve Winders): Unlike its more famous contemporary, Eagle, which has spawned many books, this is the first work devoted to Lion, a paper which began as a much inferior rival to Eagle, but which steadily improved through the 1960s as Eagle declined and was eventually absorbed by it in 1969. Author Steve Holland is a comics enthusiast of long standing and has gathered his information together over many years. Consequently it is accurate and highly detailed. (I spotted just one inconsequential error in the whole book and that was not about Lion, but Eagle, which moved to web offset printing in September 1967 and not January 1968).

His narrative explores the successes and failures of the paper and examines the contributions of editors, writers, artists and strips. He also provides details of sales figures and management changes, which were so important to the direction that the paper took.
Following the narrative, the book features short interviews with the paper’s first editor, Bernard Smith and with Barrie Tomlinson, who worked on Lion early in his career. These are followed by the full and detailed index of all Lion’s contents.

I was surprised by the large number of characters who appeared in Lion over the years. These include the familiar favourites Captain Condor, Robot Archie, Zip Nolan, Paddy Payne, The Spider and Adam Eterno, as well as the more obscure Red Knights of Morda, Oddball Oates and The 10,000 Disasters of Dort.

The book may seem expensive, but this is a specialist publication with a limited print run, published by the author and designed to appeal to the dedicated fan. It serves as a reminder that for all the many and varied books that have been written about Eagle over the years, none has explored its whole history in such detail. I have no hesitation in recommending this informative book.

Review by Steve Winders

• For more information on how to purchase Lion - King of Story Papers, visit the Bear Alley Books web site

In Review: Tomorrow Revisited

Steve Winders reviews Alastair Crompton’s new book about Frank Hampson


Published by PS Artbooks at £29.99
Hardback 214 pages

The Book: This is a lavishly coloured celebration of the life and work of Frank Hampson, the creator of one of Britain’s most popular and enduring comic strip characters, the space hero Dan Dare, who appeared in the famous Eagle comic.

Many significant examples of Hampson’s stunning detailed colour artwork are reproduced from the original illustrations in better detail than I have ever seen them before. There are also many photographs of Hampson’s studio, including members of his team posing in costume for pictures for the strip, models of spacecraft and preliminary sketches, some of which are works of art in themselves.

Alastair Crompton brings a lifetime of enthusiasm for Hampson’s work to his text, which examines his career and subsequent life and also explores the character and motivation of this remarkable artist.

The Review: Formerly an advertising copywriter, Alastair Crompton tells Hampson’s story with great clarity and makes all his points forcefully. His personal views are most evident in his attitudes to the various Dare adventures. He enthuses about the first story and he analyses strengths and weaknesses of other early adventures very well, relating them to changes of writer and other developments behind the scenes, such as Hampson’s frequent periods of ill health when he was forced to withdraw from work.

However, while acknowledging the outstanding quality of the artwork he is dismissive of the later stories written by Alan Stranks, such as The Man From Nowhere trilogy. Of this epic he merely writes “… but the story, by Stranks, was not so good.” From these comments a reader would be left unaware that Stranks was a highly regarded and experienced writer of successful radio programmes and comic and newspaper strips, or that many fans regard his work on ‘Dan Dare’ as excellent. While it is entirely appropriate that Alastair should express his own views in his book, I expected more analysis here.

Unlike many other works about Eagle and ‘Dan Dare’, factual errors in this book are negligible. Alastair explains the complicated takeovers that Eagle suffered at the end of the 1950s clearly and accurately, although he writes in his acknowledgements that
“To avoid confusing my readers, I have named the owners of Eagle from 1961-9 as Mirror Group, although the paper continued to carry the Longacre imprint.” In fact, the Longacre imprint was dropped in 1963 and the publishers listed as Odhams. He is nevertheless entirely correct in stating that the real owners were the Mirror Group and he covers this whole period of Eagle and Hampson’s life very well.

Alastair focuses prominently on Hampson’s crucial relationship with Marcus Morris, the originator of Eagle, which he helped him to create and tells the story of the background to its development in great detail. Later he compares Morris’ future success after Eagle with Hampson’s comparative failure and frustration, providing a valuable insight into the characters of the two men.

He does however devote an unnecessary chapter to a future comic project which Morris considered but dropped and which did not involve Hampson at all. While worthy of mention, this project could have been adequately covered in a couple of pages.

Much more relevant to the subject are the examples of Hampson’s work after Dan Dare which are featured here. There are pages from his final Eagle strip The Road of Courage, which tells the story of Jesus and then starter pages from eight other strips he worked on later, none of which ever achieved publication, being locked away in the publisher’s vaults for many years after Hampson left the Mirror Group in acrimonious circumstances. Each strip is accompanied by Alastair’s informative comments.

Finally there are examples of Hampson’s version of the famous newspaper strip Modesty Blaise, produced when he was invited to submit samples with a view to becoming the regular artist. For various reasons his work was not favoured by the writer Peter O’Donnell and Jim Holdaway took on the job instead.

This is Alastair’s second book about Frank Hampson, following his The Man Who Drew Tomorrow twenty five years ago; hence the title. It is a complete rewriting of the first book and incorporates a great deal of previously unavailable material.

I know that he was not entirely satisfied with his first effort. He should be delighted with this!

• Buy Tomorrow Revisited from amazon.co.uk