Sydney and the Jeff Hawke club will be at the Lakeland comic art festival in Kendal this weekend (from 16th to the 18th October). If you are in the area come and see the Jeff Hawke stand, meet Sydney and view some of the superb JH artwork. You can also buy the large format Jeff Hawke books published by the club. Find us at stand 24 at the town hall venue. Skipper Prosset
The third Jeff Hawke story which appeared in the pages of the junior Express weekly was THE SPACE FRONTIER which ran from July 9th 1955 until December 24th.
Like Sydney’s MARTIAN INVASION which was printed concurrently in the pages of the Daily Express, this
story also represents a change of direction for the character. He is no longer the agent of the SHINING ONES but is an RAF officer based in England and put in charge of building Earth’s first space station in orbit. His former companions have also disappeared and he has a new sidekick in the form of Ricky, a young officer. The opening scenes, where Jeff supervises the building of the station closely track those in the MARTIAN INVASION and the space stations themselves, once completed looks almost identical . We learn that while this is going on, a race of aliens whose saucers are in the vicinity of Earth are planning to invade and have set up a fifth column of sympathetic Earthmen whose help they are enlisting to accomplish their aims.
We are introduced at this point to Bobby Agar a young boy whose family has been selected to be among the first to live on the new space station . There was probably an editorial decision to introduce this new character with whom the young readers could identify to replace Dick Regan from the first two stories. Bobby is much more pro-active than Dick ever was and actually takes a central part in most of the action.
The aliens plan to destroy the space station which they see as a threat to their success and so they divert a meteorite swarm to bombard it. One of the space-rocks finds its mark and breaches the hull causing a violent escape of air from the station which sucks Ricky into space. Jeff goes out in a space-taxi and locates him but due to the aliens tractor beam he cannot get back to the station and the two drift helplessly in the void, unable to find their way back.
In the meantime. Back on Earth, Bobby is using his grandfather’s telescope to view the space station, which he cannot wait to visit. By chance he sees Jeff and Ricky and notifies Space headquarters England as to Jeff’s position.
As a reward for his quick thinking , Bobby’s father takes him to the Space station for a guided tour, but while his father is called away briefly, the boy decides to enter one of the spaceships on the launchpad and take a look around. Before he realises what is happening the crew enter and the ship takes off. The young castaway is discovered only after the ship is spaceborne and he learns that he is on the rescue ship that is on course to pick up Jeff and Ricky. He is allowed to help the radar officer and Jeff’s space-taxi is located in the nick of time before his oxygen runs out. Once the two spacemen are aboard the rescue ship , its crew heads back to Earth but not before Bobby saves the day once more by reaching a cut-out switch , essential for shutting off a faulty fuel pump, which is located in a part of the engine that no adult hand is small enough to reach. Safely back on terra firma , Bobby is thanked by Jeff for his brave actions . Skipper Prossit
You may be interested to know that we have launched a new Jeff Hawke board on PINTEREST, a popular website where you can share , find and swap images of subjects you are interested in. It was opened on 18th September to co-incide with the Jeff Hawke weekend in Bristol. The board will not concern itself with the JH stories so much as with images of the innumerable characters and aliens that appear throughout the strip with some brief descriptions about who and what they are. Please support us by visiting the board ” Jeff Hawke – British space hero” and “liking” the pics. We will be adding more pics every week.
Skipper Prossit
Below are numbers 16 to 20 in the Jeff Hawke collectors card series issued by Junior Express weekly. Skipper prossit
High in the evening sky over southern England a pilot falls from a strange spacecraft and plummets toward the dark Earth. After anxious moments the Shute unfurls and billows into shape . The pilot drifts slowly to the ground . Thus Jeff Hawke returns to Earth at the start of “The Martian invasion” . And
Hawke’s return to Terra Firma on this occasion is metaphorical ad well as actual. For Sydney was changing the direction of the strip fundamentally at this point. In the first story “space rider” he was finding his way, and his first inspiration had been Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, the most influential space comic strip of the thirties and forties . Space rider showed many similarities to Flash Gordon; an Earthman finding himself on another world, and overthrowing a tyrannical regime. But this type of story was a little clichéd by the nineteen fifties and Sydney decided that he would have to change this thin fare for something more substantial if the strip was to survive.
When he bailed out of the Shining Ones’ saucer he not only made the journey back to terra firma , but that journey represented his transition from Space fantasy to a more subtle character rooted in that background of reality and hard sci-fi which we now associate with Hawke. He lost his costume and cape and replaced them with an RAF uniform and a group of friends and associates with whom his character could interact, develop and be reflected . The somewhat cardboard cut-out hero of Spacerider , was re-moulded into a subtler and more interesting
personality
This subtler approach shows itself immediately in the host of new characters which appear in the story and which form a richer backdrop to Hawke’s world. These include Doctor Gilton, Groupie , Smitty and a host of named astronauts; but two emerge in sharper focus than all the others, namely Laura and Mac who will prove to be key figures in the development of the strip . Sydney remembers that Doctor Gilton, Laura’s father was a character who he intended to develop at first , but that as the plot unfolded, Laura, almost by an instinctive process took centre stage as the female lead and Hawke’s romantic interest
Mac emerged almost by a throw of the dice, from the numerous named spacemen that accompanied Hawke in building the space station . Sydney says he wanted someone to act as a foil to Hawke’s essentially serious nature and a wise-cracking Canadian( a nationality which also gave a nod to Daily Express owner Lord Beaverbrook) fitted the bill perfectly .
Not only were the dramatis personae changed in this story but also all the props and scenery . for we are now in the realistic and familiar world of the nineteen fifties albeit with a little imaginative increase in space technology.
Thus Hawke’s career was relaunched along this new trajectory , a platform from which messrs Jordan and Patterson could now weave the ingenious and subtle stories with which we are now all familiar. Skipper Prossitt
We have been in touch recently with the sculptor of the Hawke and Fortuna model which was featured here a couple of weeks ago, and he has provided us with some more photos of the piece together with more information about his model-making. Gianluca Gianfaldoni, an Italian sculptor and model-maker , tells me that he has always been interested in sci-fi and has a particular fondness for British science-fiction from both T.V. and cinema. He has been an enthusiastic reader of Jeff Hawke since the early 1970’s so this particular piece was really a labour of love. Gianluca’s day job is that of financial director for a large Italian company, but his passion is model-making. He says that the lack of commercially available models of subjects that he was particularly interested in was what started him off in building his own. His models are built from scratch using polymer and epoxy clays built up on a wire armature. When the figure is complete he moulds the master-figure in a silicone rubber and produces the final pieces in resin . Most of his characters are in 1/12 scale and display superb detailing and animation.Although he has a website showing some of his work, he tells me that there is a better selection of his models on his Facebook page . Skipper Prossitt
A lone astronaut is stranded on Mars with no hope of rescue and no means of communicating with Earth.
After a series of disasters and with his supplies nearly gone, he is completely alone on this alien world. No this is not the plotline of Ridley Scotts new blockbuster “The Martian”, due for release later this month and based on the superb novel by Andy Weir, but the beginning sequence of Hal Starr , written and drawn by Sydney Jordan for a Dutch publication EPPO in 1988. There is of course no suggestion of plagiarism but it is interesting to note the similarities in the opening sequences of both stories, how both writers use the dramatic idea of one man completely alone on an alien planet, except in the Hal Starr story we soon discover that he is not alone. Hal Starr was reproduced in full ( coloured by John Ridgeway) in “Spaceship Away magasine ( beginning in issue 8) and which is still widely available. Skipper Prossit
Sydney has recently received , as a mark of thanks for his co-operation in the production of the last two collections of Hawke stories, a large vignette , which reproduces in 3D ,the cover picture on the very last volume . It was commissioned by Fondazione Rosellini, the publishing house which produced these last two volumes and which we reviewed here last February. The piece was the work of talented Italian sculptor/model-maker Gianluca Gianfaldoni , and beautifully depicts Hawke and Fortuna in about 1/12 scale with part of the “Hope”
behind them ,and with a view of the Earth and shattered moon beyond that.
Gianluca specializes in Sci-fi sculpts and models which have covered many subjects familiar to British science-fiction enthusiasts including SPACE 1999, UFO and Blake 7. His interesting website gianlucagianfaldoni.com , although still under construction is certainly worth a visit. Skipper Prossit
1956 was perhaps the Anno Mirabilis of the Hawke strip, the year in which Jordan and Patterson got into their stride and everything changed.
This creative pair decided that something extra was needed in the daily strip; Just as Dan Dare had the Mekon and Holmes had had Moriarty, so Jeff Hawke needed an arch-enemy. Between them they created the character Chalcedon , a larger than life (literally) space-pirate and outlaw, full of braggadocio and low cunning. He made his first appearance in the story SANCTUARY in panel H717 , where we see him as a shadowy and menacing figure on the research satellite “Cupid”. and we are kept in suspense for a full six weeks until we see his face for the first
time!
This decision to create Chalcedon was more momentous than they realized at the time. For it led to unanticipated consequences for the strip, consequences which would completely change the character of the stories and transform the strip into its definitive form. Although the initial plan was simply to introduce an arch-enemy , the ramifications for the strip didn’t stop there. . For if you want to introduce an alien outlaw, that suggests that there is a law which he is outside. Thus almost by accident the Galactic federation was summoned into existence, headed by its two stalwarts, His excellency and Kolvorok, characters who in time were to be as emblematic of the strip as Hawke and Maclean themselves. And being a galaxy wide body this federation was depicted as a heterogeneous array of many different alien types working together , a trope introduced at this point for the first time that in later years was to be a defining characteristic of the Hawke strip.
From this one decision and the consequences that flowed from it Patterson and Jordan did something most unusual in sci-fi writing . This group of newly minted aliens , were they to have followed the usual conventions of sci-fi , would have either been cold calculating inhuman creatures with whom Hawke and co would have fought their battles, or would have been creatures like the Ptyrrans whose interests co-incided with those of the humans but who were ultimately mysterious and unknowable.
Instead they made them sympathetic beings with whom the reader could identify and sympathise ;
beings with the same worries and exasperations that we have . In doing this there were thus created two foci in the strip with which the reader could identify :on the one side Hawke and his human companions , and on the other the aliens themselves for whom the humans are causing so many problems in their efforts to police the galaxy. In many stories the members of the Galactic federation act as a sort of Greek chorus , commenting on and giving perspective to the actions and follies of the.Earthmen. And in fact the aliens occasionally had stories of their own where Hawke and co never appeared at all . Thus was created that magic ingredient which in the end was to lift the JH stories far above the usual run of science fiction and raise it to a new level.
From here on the stories were no longer parochial and geo-centric – us vs the aliens – but took on a much larger vista and an almost galactic point of view,
where the actions of the humans were just part of a much larger pattern. The Hawke strip was never the same after Chalcedon and his unexpected consequences lifted it head and shoulders above its contemporaries. Skipper Prossit
The recent impressive flyby of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft and the surprising revelations that its close up photography revealed 
about the planet reminded me of the Italian version of Sydney’s HERE BE TYGERS which is entitled L’ENIGMA DI PLUTONE ( THE PLUTO ENIGMA), a story which starts with Jeff and Mac surveying the planet in their ship the “Galileo “ before being sent to investigate a strange ship which is lying out beyond the Pluto system. Like all other depictions of Pluto before New Horizons revealed its active geology and young surface, the Hawke version of the dwarf planet is of an old ,many cratered world beset by jagged mountains. Hawke comments that the atmosphere is “frozen to the rocks” and indeed it is now thought that the “ice`’ on Pluto’s pole is frozen molecular nitrogen.
As it hurtled past Pluto at almost 31,000 mph New horizons also captured detailed images of Pluto’s moon Charon which proved another surprise with its geologically active surface, showing a huge canyon somewhat reminiscent of the Valles Marinaris on Mars.
Sydney produced a colour painting of a spacecraft in orbit between Pluto and Charon a few years back, entitled “At the systems edge” an image which was reproduced in black and white in the JH cosmos ( Vol.3 no.3)
We are reproducing here for the first time the full colour version.
Skipper Prossit
