The Jeff Hawke club Has recently acquired a small collection of original JH artwork, comprising contiguous strips from the story POLTERGIEST, drawn in 1968 when Sydney and Willie Patterson’s creative collaboration was at its apogee, in what is regarded generally as the strip’s golden age. It shows Sydney’s creativity at its height.  Each board is signed by Sydney

If you are interested in acquiring any of this superb artwork please contact our editor at  william@williamrudling.co.uk

There are currently only seven strips left for sale from this rare collection and all profits from sales will go to Sydney himself.    Skipper Prossitt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The story Rip van Haddow, about a Canadian flyer who finds a strange portal into another world after crash-landing in the Rockies, first appeared in April 1963 , but the seeds of this story go back to the days of Sydney’s youth in Scotland. Sydney and his childhood, friend Willie Patterson, although from relatively poor backgrounds were united in their fascination with books and the new worlds of possibility that they opened up. According to Sydney they would discuss together subjects as varied as science, literature and art and these mutual interests bound their friendship ever closer. On one of the many walks they took together in their hometown of Perth, they encountered a young man with whom they fell into conversation. He was of similar age to themselves but from   an entirely different background being from one of the local “landed families”.   Sydney recalls   him as “extraordinary”, having many interests similar to their own but viewing everything through a very unique prism, due to his somewhat eccentric personality. Sydney remembers that “ he hinted at another world beyond our social register” and opened up to them the possibility of subtle worlds , beyond the visible and quotidian. This unique encounter remained with them and its memory was to serve as the basis of the later story. The young man’ s name was –  Haddow.

Skipper Prossitt

Sydney celebrated a significant birthday at the Jeff Hawke club weekend st West Dean college in Sussex last month (Sept ’18). A special Jeff Hawke themed birthday cake was presented to him by the club at the end of the dinner.

The annual   Jeff Hawke weekend was held this year at West Dean college in west Sussex . West Dean is an atmospheric stately home , which was   opened as a centre for the study of arts and crafts in 1971. The college , with its numerous buildings and annexes offers a variety of degree and post-graduate courses, while still retaining its   stately home feel. The walls are adorned with ancient weaponry and portraits , animal trophies and cases of stuffed birds – all the accoutrements of a nineteenth century grand house. The club had its annual meeting in these atmospheric surroundings   and  a dinner to celebrate Sydney’s 90^th birthday. We were so impressed by West Dean that we have decided to hold next year’s meeting in the same venue. If you would be interested in joining us in 2019 then contact William Rudling for details.

Skipper Prossitt

 

As well as his expertise in space technology Hawke also has an obvious passion for the motor car and drives a variety of vehicles throughout the strip.   He shares this passion with his creator ; Sydney himself has had a lifelong interest in applied engineering , appreciating that marriage of functionality and aesthetic design so obviously manifest in classics like the Mk1 Spitfire and various models of the Porsche motor car , a version of which, the 356, he owned in the 1960‘s at the height of the strip’s fame. Hawke shares this love of speed and Sydney’s depiction of the future that we see in Hawke, includes wide, and relatively uncongested motorways including a version of what was in reality later to be the M4 but extending down into Devon and Cornwall, doubtless to serve the Dartmoor Space HQ. There is a speed limit in force , as Mac and his companion discover to their cost during the motorway chase sequence in “The helping hand”, when the crash occurs at 300mph! But the legal limit seems high , more like the German autobahn than that the modern British motorway as Hawke happily speeds along at 150mph in “The Gamesman”.

Hawke himself drives a variety of sixties style sports cars in the strips,  which Sydney describes as amalgams of the Ferraris and Maseratis of the time  and an attempt to extrapolate what they might  later evolve into , but his Turbodyne, which is an entirely futuristic vehicle first appears in “ Council for the defense” . It is a very sleek and aerodynamic vehicle   with a fin at the rear   rather than a spoiler bar which Sydney describes as “a nod to Donald Campbell’s bluebird” , with which it appears to have much in common.   The turbodyne appears once again in “ The Gamesman” as mentioned above, but when a tyre bursts at speed the car careers off the road to a certain destruction , which is only avoided by instantaneous transition into an alien dimension! Thereafter the components from its wreck   are used   to make a means to escape.

In subsequent stories Hawke reverts to his sixties style sports cars.   Skipper Prossitt

After Sydney visited the Cartoon arts festival in Kendal last October, he told me he was struck by the modern style of comic book illustration and how it differed so much from  that realistic and filmic style which obtained during his own working life. The new style , heavily influenced by Japanese Manga art and also by computer game art is of a completely different genre. Intrigued as he was, and as a light-hearted experiment , Sydney asked Rachel Tubb, an artist/illustrator and web designer to render one of the old JH panels in this contemporary style. We present the resulting illustration below. Rachel herself describes the style as “ Geometric 50’s cartoon meets Japanese manga with jazzy bubblegum undertones”.  Skipper Prossitt

 

 

 

 

 

Sydney’s story VOODOO depicts an ape of indeterminate species but who nonetheless has a complex and interesting pedigree. While clearly not a gorilla he is, on the other hand , too large to be a chimpanzee as he can carry a human being. While of no known species his form seems familiar to us.Sydney attributes his design to the influence of many popular depictions of apes in popular literature that he saw when young. This ape of popular imagination( half-chimp half-gorilla) has his roots back in the mid-nineteenth century and his first progenitor might be said to be the French sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet. His sculpture of an ape carrying off a woman (1859) a rather sensationalist piece , became the inspiration for popular art and illustration for many years afterwards. Fremiet himself had a professional connection with the Jardin Des Plantes in Paris, where he was professor of anatomical drawing. That venerable institution had obtained the first Gorilla corpse to be seen in France. In 1859 Fremiet was given the task of reconstructing and animating it.

While the gait and pose of the creature were accurate his interpretation of the overall shape was not entirely correct( in the same way that early English paleantologists misinterpreted the Iguanadon). The head was not quite right and his gorilla had monstrous fangs . This reconstruction became the basis of his sculpture APE CARRYING OFF A WOMAN ,an absurd composition which owed as much to Poe’s MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE , a work which Fremiet knew well , as it did to the reconstructed gorilla skeleton. This sculpture  in turn became the model for many subsequent depictions , especially in popular illustration given its salacious tone .Edgar Rice Burroughs used this hybrid ape in TARZAN OF THE APES (1912) ,representing them as Tarzan’s own adopted tribe. By the time of his writing,of course, in the early twentieth century, the appearance of real apes and gorillas was well known and Borroughs named this hybrid the Mangani as if they were a real and distinct species.Thus from the fictional Mangani does The ape in VOODOO derive his origins . And true to the apes of popular fiction he carries off his own share of struggling women. Skipper Prossitt

Professor Stephen Hawking’s work on the nature of time and space has for myself and millions like me been both intriguing and bewildering.Being somewhat of a novice in the field of Quantum physics I took comfort from the fact that his awesome treatise was the outcome of an original ‘sense of wonder’ which informed his boyhood years, something he shared with most science fiction storytellers like myself. Embedded in the elegant, but, for us enigmatic equations is the playful reference to multi universes, doors to the past and the future and parallel realities where you and I live out our alternative lives! A cornucopia of inspiration and enough to father an endless flow of stories…
Stephen was dealt a cruel blow by the Universe when it passed a virtual death sentence on him at 21-but he has had his revenge. Living on for a further fifty five years, he has uncovered the innermost secrets of the Cosmos and exposed its true origins.
Now he joins that August company of those who seek the truth  – Sydney Jordan

“Such souls whose sudden visitation daze the world

Vanish like lightning, but they leave behind,

A voice that in the distance far away,

Wakens the slumbering ages”

Henry Taylor

 

A strangely shaped visitor, the first known object to enter the solar system from interstellar space was picked up and tracked by astronomers last October . The prosaically named 1l/2017 U1. was rapidly re- christened Oumuamua, a Hawaiian name in recognition of its discovery at the Haleakala observatory on that island. Although not visible , even through a powerful telescope, the sine curve of its light emission reveals it to be elongated and rotating on its long axis. Illario Vernelli, founder and administrator of the original Jeff Hawke website in Italy, has pointed out an uncanny resemblance between the discovery of Oumuamua and the opening sequence of the Hawke story OUT OF TOUCH, where an exploration party from Earth exploring the Saturn system, discovered a mysterious elongated object hiding in the ring system of the giant planet. It turns out to be an alien artifact, a craft of strange design and even stranger composition, as it’s made from anti-matter. Oumuamua itself, did not pass near to Saturn as it dipped into the Solar system ecliptic at a very steep 33degrees, entering inside the orbit of Mercury , dipping past that of the Earth and exiting again in the space between our world and Mars.

 

Its appearance also resonated strongly with the openIng sequence of Arthur C Clark’s RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA and although there was initial speculation about the possibility of Oumuamua being an alien craft, with even such eminent voices as those of Steven Hawking commenting on this distant possibility, subsequent analysis has revealed it to be a rock, albeit an interesting one. The size of its hyperbolic orbit shows it to be a visitor, not from the Oort Cloud but from interstellar space and thus , originally from another star system .

The complete OUT OF TOUCH story can be found in JEFF HAWKE COSMOS vol5 no2 and BBC’s SKY AT NIGHT devoted its January 2018 programme to Oumuamua which us still available on Iplayer. Skipper Prossitt