Sydney Jordan began the Jeff Hawke  strip with a hero , who he himself admits, owed something to the influence of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon . But as the stories progressed and the strip found its own style, not only did the storylines turn from the superhero form of SPACERIDER to a harder more realistic science fiction, but the characters themselves developed into more rounded personalities. The appearance of Jeff , Mac and Laura firmed up quickly into the recognizable characters that we all came to know . The drawing style continued to develop through the first 6 years of the strip as Sydney showed increasing adeptness and confidence both in the line art and   the beautiful chiaroscuro of light and shade that was to become the hallmark of his drawing.

While happy with his skills in the technical depiction of spacecraft and vehicles of all kinds, Sydney wanted to give his characters a commensurate realism which he knew could only properly be achieved through drawing them from life.

But where to find someone to serve as a suitable model for Jeff Hawke??

By an odd chance Sydney spotted a newspaper advertisement for cigarettes which featured a model who bore an uncanny resemblance to his Jeff Hawke character. By the good offices of some contacts in Fleet street it was discovered that the model used in the ad was one Hans Meyer. A South African of German parentage Meyer had only recently arrived in England to pursue a career as an advertising model . He was later to break through into both film and television – his most notable role , at least for English audiences being that of Hauptmann Ulmann in the COLDITZ series.

Sydney met Meyer and arranged a photoshoot in May 1961 in which Meyer and other actors would pose in a variety of portraits and sets which would form a photo reference for future JH stories. The first story to use these photographic references was PASTMASTER. Sydney could now draw his characters with a whole new level of depth and realism . Hawke did not look substantially different from before , he just had a greater psychological depth with a subtler depiction of emotion. The fact that Hans Meyer looks so much like the original Hawke as Sydney had envisaged him allowed for a semless transition to this new way of working. The enclosed pictures show some of the many individual photos taken during the shoot. In a later blog we will see some of the posed sets containing several actors and the final results as they appeared in PASTMASTER.

Skipper Prossit