Month: September 2018

Hawke’s wheels

by Skipper Prossit

Prossit avatarAs 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”.

Sydney's depiction from the 60's story THE HELPING HAND of what a future sports model might look like, shows a remarkable similarity to the modern Lamborghini .
Sydney’s depiction from the 60’s story THE HELPING HAND of what a future sports model might look like, shows a remarkable similarity to the modern Lamborghini .

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

Hawke's turbodyne, showing some similarities to Campbell's Bluebird
Hawke’s turbodyne, showing some similarities to Campbell’s Bluebird