27 August 2017

A piece of artwork has recently been acquired  by the Cartoon arts museum which was passed on to the Jeff Hawke club. It comes from the archive of the Bayly -Souster group  for whom Sydney worked when he first arrived in London in 1952, and is  the first of his original  sci-fi  strips  which he created as a personal project in the early fifties with  the hope of  eventual syndication in a national newspaper. See the post of  20 December 2015 – ” The butterfly effect in Fleet street”  for more about Sydney’s collaboration with Eric Souster and his agency. His original character was named Orion but  the strip contains the same basic elements as the opening scenes in Space Rider into which it eventually evolved;  an unknown craft approaching Earth and Jet fighters sent up to intercept it.  The introductory text at the start of the strip   is also characteristically Jordanesque,  an example of Sydney’s perennially poetic response to the  grandeur and magnificence of the universe, a theme continued  throughout the Hawke stories.  The Express offered syndication , but  wanted the name changed to Jeff Hawke  and more emphasis  placed on the RAF presence in the story. This accomplished , Hawke launched into the stratosphere  on 15th February 1954. Skipper Prossitt

 

 

20 August 2017

In 2014 Fondazione Rosellini , an Italian publisher , printed in book form those last Jeff Hawke stories omitted from the otherwise complete Milano libri collection. Together the two Rosellini volumes covered all the remainig stories up to SONG FOR METHUSELAH and at the back of the last volume  also printed a complete Chronology of the  Hawke corpus. Intriguingly, at the very end of the list, after SONG FOR METHUSELAH, two more  titles  were listed  and both were marked  ” Non Realizata” ( not produced). They were  called ICE NEEDLE  and DIRE STRAITS and Duncan Lunan, Sydney’s collaborator in many of the later Hawke stories , was mentioned as the c0-writer of  both.  I contacted Duncan in the hope that he could shed some light on these and after some searching  he very kindly sent me  a complete  story synopsis for both titles together with concept sketches   and an outline of how he and his co-writer  came to light upon these themes.

The first story, DIRE STRAITS  introduces more Vikings, similar to those seen in PHAROAH’S ARMY  but this time from the New World and the second, ICE NEEDLE  concerns a Japanese expedition to Uranus using  a craft powered by concentrated solar energy. Future posts will unfold both these stories in greater detail. Skipper Prossitt