The Star venturer story continues this week with Kolvorok, showing a distinctly uncharacteristic bravery in going out to investigate the wrecked ship – in contrast to his usual cowardly disposition. Even his crew members suspect his motives though!
Skipper Prossit
This post is aimed at those who have stumbled across this website but are not familiar with the Jeff Hawke club. The JHC is a unique and very successful publishing venture, re-printing for the first time ever the entire run of Jeff Hawke stories , probably the greatest sci-fi strip of the 20th century.Created and drawn by Sydney Jordan, Jeff Hawke ran consecutively as a syndicated strip in two British newspapers from 1954 until 1988 and was a sci-fi strip aimed at an adult audience. Its themes are subtle and thought provoking – its artwork mature and realistic. The entire corpus comprises 111 stories and until the JHC began its work, only six of these were available in reprinted form in English. To date , since its formation in 2001, the club, with full co-operation of Sydney Jordan, has re-published 93 of the stories in a series of large-format books, which reproduce the strips ( from master-prints in the newspaper archives) at their original size. Accompanying each story are extensive notes, both by Sydney and by well known science author and collaborator Duncan Lunan.
The books are published three times a year and are available exclusively to members of the Jeff Hawke club. Membership fee is paid annually and for this you receive the next three books as they become available. Membership also allows you to purchase all the other books in the series and thus to obtain the entire collection of Jeff Hawke stories to date.This is a unique opportunity to own and read this groundbreaking sci-fi series, available nowhere else.
Annual membership rates ( including regular postage) are as follows ( assuming that you pay via Paypal)
U.K. £28.50 E.U. £34 Rest of the world £41
U.K. £26 ( if paid by cheque, bank transfer etc) Contact our club secretary at the email address at the bottom of the page for more details
Skipper Prossit (some of the JHC books below – click to enlarge) 
Here is an interesting cutting from the Daily Express from 1956 in the early days of the JH strip, where a keen reader is wondering where the inspiration for the stories came from. Sydney included a little pen and ink self-portrait in the column and says he added a tartan tie to fly the flag for his Scottish ancestry.
Skipper Prossit
The first story in which Sydney used the photo-references of Hans Meyer and other models was PASTMASTER (H2287 – H2351) in which Ap Tiryns, a criminal scientist from the far future plans to transport the entire Lunar colony with its 20th century technology , back 13,000 years in time and thus to re-write all of human history from that point.
It is interesting to compare the existing images from the photoshoot to the panels in which they were used. An example is included below together with some full body shots of Meyer in action poses
An interesting feature to note about PASTMASTER is the existence of the Time Guardians whose purpose is to prevent the timelines of history from being changed and to avoid all the ensuing paradoxes that time travel might create. This story was written in 1961 long before the Timelords of Doctor Who or Sapphire and Steel came onto the scene. Another first for Jeff Hawke!
Skipper Prossit
