Frank Bellamy: "... if I got the chance, I’d drop everything and start drawing “Heros” tomorrow."

The lavish new hardcover collection 'Frank Bellamy's Heros of Spartan' features not only mouth-watering 
scans of Bellamy originals, many of which have never seen 
print, but also includes the first ever reprint of Dez Skinn’s interview with Bellamy from 1973. With permission of the publisher and with thanks to Dez Skinn, a few short passages from that interview have been excerpted below. The text is © Dez Skinn ~ Leif


FB: Actually, I prefer never to have to draw a strip more than quarter up.

DS: ... which is only fractionally bigger than the printed size. Why do you prefer this size?

FB: I don’t, actually. I prefer most of all to draw same size.



DS: But I would have thought you could get sharper lines and a tighter effect if the originals were drawn for reduction?

FB: No. I don’t want it to appear more detailed in print, just because it has been reduced a lot from the original size. I’d rather present a finely drawn original in the first place, and therefore, once again, give the editor a piece of finished work ready for press, that he can look at almost exactly as it will appear in print.



DS: Could you tell us more about how you started on a “Heros” instalment, right from receiving the script?

FB: My usual method would be that I’d read the script through, imagining the words in pictures and noting down “l”, “m” and “s” – large, medium and small – by the writer’s frame descriptions. That is, as I’ve said, I would ignore the writer’s remarks about close-ups and long shots.



Then I can see which are the important frames and which are the fill-ins. There would always be one very large frame that would sum up the whole spread, so I’d put a large cross by that one. Then I’d work out a thumbnail layout. Generally, I’d set it out in banks of three or four frames across.



From there it would soon build up around the one or two main frames.



Then I’d go straight on to the board, never making roughs. The “Dan Dare” team used to make roughs, but I always thought that if you make a highly detailed rough, you can’t draw the same thing a second time, on your board, and capture as much atmosphere. There’s always something lacking. There is no spontaneity or imagination in copying a rough on to board.



DS: It seems that British comics had a swords and sorcery boom long before the current American trend. Not only your “Heros the Spartan”, but John Burns’ “Wrath of the Gods”, Ron Embleton’s “Wulf the Briton”, Don Lawrence’s “Karl the Viking”, “Clac the Gladiator” and so on……



FB: Yes, I suppose they were sword and sorcery heroes, really. I definitely found "Heros" to be something entirely different from anything I’d ever draw. I was able to create giant warrior tribes, sea monsters and eerie creatures.



I must admit, I thoroughly enjoyed drawing “Heros”, and if I got the chance, I’d drop everything and start drawing “Heros” tomorrow.



* Thanks to Dez Skinn for allowing this short excerpt from his 1973 interview with Frank Bellamy. The text is © Dez Skinn. Thanks also to Alan Davis, Paul Holder, Norman Boyd, Paul Stephenson and David Ashford who provided us with the images that appear in this post.

Illustrators editor Peter Richardson has edited and designed a beautiful book entitled Frank Bellamy’s Heros the Spartan. Available in two luxurious editions measuring a gigantic 
11 x 14 inches, the deluxe limited edition of only 600 copies with 272 pages features a beautifully designed blue hard cover with embossed and varnished detailing. The leather bound and numbered edition, restricted to 120 copies, features a beautiful gold embossed red cover and slipcase, plus a tipped in numbered plate, and an additional 24 pages of some of the most stunning Heros originals, which have previously remained hidden in private collections.



* Frank Bellamy's Heros the Spartan, from which all of today's art and text is excerpted, is now available from Book Palace Books

Frank Bellamy on 'Heros' : "... I wanted to give it instant impact"

The lavish new hardcover collection 'Frank Bellamy's Heros of Spartan' features not only mouth-watering 
scans of Bellamy originals, many of which have never seen 
print, but also includes the first ever reprint of Dez Skinn’s interview with Bellamy from 1973. With permission of the publisher and with thanks to Dez Skinn, a few short passages from that interview have been excerpted below. The text is © Dez Skinn ~ Leif


DS: When drawing “Heros”, how may hours of the week, on average, do you think it took to draw a spread?

FB: It would easily take me a five day week. Sometimes six or seven days.





Being fantasy, I didn’t have to do all the research I’d needed for sets like “Churchill”, but some frames took much longer to draw than others.



One extreme example of this was a week when I had a big frame which covered almost the entire spread, surrounded by smaller frames – that particular page was on display, by the way, at the American Academy of Comic Book Arts.



DS: What made you want to draw that instalment the way you did? Just the urge to have a huge battle scene, or what?

FB: No, much more than that. The script was ideal for the type of composition I prefer. Let me explain.



In my early days, I used to watch my son, David, when he was about eight years old, reading comics. I’m sure this would not apply so much with the American type of comics, because they have longer stories, all in colour, and all based around the same person. But in English comics, with ten or more different episodes of different stories in each issue, I noticed something. David and his pals would look through the early Eagles, and when they flicked right through the whole issue, they’d go back and read some of the strips. Quite a few they would ignore and turn straight past. I asked them why and they said they didn’t like the drawings.



So, because the art didn’t appeal to them, though the scripts could have been first rate, they’d skip them. I remembered that I used to do the same. If I didn’t like the artwork, I didn’t bother with it. But if I liked the artwork, I’d read it, no matter what the story was about.



DS: Then you consider the artwork to be more important than the script…?

FB: Well, I might be a bit biased but I do think art carries quite a lot of the weight. It makes the whole thing look good on first impression. Another thing I’ve seen David and other boys do is pick up a comic and say “I’ve seen that one!” This gave me the clue about composition of the page. I’d like to make sure that the reader could see at first glance whether he had or hadn’t seen the spread before. Of course, I made a problem for myself here, trying to get as different a look to each instalment as possible. And so the answer to why I did a big frame, a big battle scene, is that I wanted to give it instant impact and look as different as possible.



Tomorrow: Conclusion

* Thanks to Dez Skinn for allowing this short excerpt from his 1973 interview with Frank Bellamy. The text is © Dez Skinn. Thanks also to Alan Davis, Paul Holder, Norman Boyd, Paul Stephenson and David Ashford who provided us with the images that appear in this post.

Illustrators editor Peter Richardson has edited and designed a beautiful book entitled Frank Bellamy’s Heros the Spartan. Available in two luxurious editions measuring a gigantic 
11 x 14 inches, the deluxe limited edition of only 600 copies with 272 pages features a beautifully designed blue hard cover with embossed and varnished detailing. The leather bound and numbered edition, restricted to 120 copies, features a beautiful gold embossed red cover and slipcase, plus a tipped in numbered plate, and an additional 24 pages of some of the most stunning Heros originals, which have previously remained hidden in private collections.



* Frank Bellamy's Heros the Spartan, from which all of today's art and text is excerpted, is now available from Book Palace Books

Frank Bellamy: "I thought I could draw, but I found out I couldn't"

Continuing this week's look at the British cartoonist/illustrator with short excerpts from the new lavish hardcover collection, "Frank Bellamy's Heros of Spartan"

From the book's introduction...

Frank Bellamy was born in Kettering, UK. Bellamy was a self-taught artist whose first job application was for a local shoe factory, but he soon realized that his early artistic talent was a path he wished to pursue.



His career in Blamire's Studio began low key with the usual fetching, carrying, sweeping up and the inevitable tea-making duties. In a 1973 interview with Dez Skinn and Dave Gibbons, Bellamy recalled those early days: "I thought I could draw, but I found out I couldn't, seeing all the studio artists work." His talent was soon put to more appropriate use producing local spot advertising for newspapers.



He had a further apprenticeship in the Norfolk Studio, London, after which his confidence grew...



... and in 1953 he went freelance, realizing that to work full-time in the studio, and take extra work for Mickey Mouse Weekly would be too much.



This initial work in comic strips raised his profile as he worked on 'Monty Carstairs' from 25 July, 1953 to 26 June, 1954.



Then he moved over to his first colour comic work 'Walt Disney's True Life Adventures: Living Desert' until 31 July 1954, when a better offer came his way. Marcus Morris, with Frank Hampson, had created the million-selling Eagle comic, a blast of colour in a bleak post-war children's landscape. In the August 1954 edition Bellamy's black and white art appeared on the strip 'The Fleet Family' a modern type of Swiss Family Robinson which he also went on to draw followed by 'King Arthur' and 'Robin Hood's Adventures', until the 17 August 1957 issue, a period of three years' continuous weekly deadlines.



He had six weeks between 'Robin Hood' and the next strip for the Eagle comic itself - 'The Happy Warrior', the true life story of Winston Churchill.



After this assignment was completed, he went on to do back pages in colour of 'David the Shepherd King' and 'Marco Polo', but stopped the latter after only eight episodes as he had a more prominent feature.



Bellamy:

"I thing Frank Hampson was getting a bit tired of 'Dan Dare' by this time. So Marcus Morris, editor of Eagle at that time, asked me if I'd like to take over. I had a chat with Frank Hampson, who also wanted me to take over, and under the agreement that it would be for one year only, I started drawing 'Dan Dare'."



Bellamy expressed relief at being able to draw fantasy rather than having to rigidly adhere to accurate representations, however he inherited a poisoned chalice. During the year on 'Dan Dare' he worked with some of Hampson's former staff drawing whole pages one week and only a few panels the following week. The changed appearance, the mixture of art styles, has inflamed opinions against Bellamy's work to this day.

His next strip was considered by many to be a natural for Bellamy, a lover of things African and big game hunting - 'Fraser of Africa'.



Moving from earning money for creating one full colour page to a double page colour centre-spread must have appealed to him, and thus Bellamy's work moved to the centre pages of Eagle with another story of a living personality - 'Montgomery of Alamein'. Bellamy received a phone call from the Eagle staff asking if he would be interested in a new Tom Tully script about "the swashbuckling adventures of someone who would be a cross between a Roman warrior and an ancient Greek soldier."

Tomorrow: Heros the Spartan

* Thanks to Alan Davis, Paul Holder, Norman Boyd, Paul Stephenson and David Ashford who provided us with the images that appear in this post.

Illustrators editor Peter Richardson has edited and designed a beautiful book entitled Frank Bellamy’s Heros the Spartan. Available in two luxurious editions measuring a gigantic 
11 x 14 inches, the deluxe limited edition of only 600 copies with 272 pages features a beautifully designed blue hard cover with embossed and varnished detailing. The leather bound and numbered edition, restricted to 120 copies, features a beautiful gold embossed red cover and slipcase, plus a tipped in numbered plate, and an additional 24 pages of some of the most stunning Heros originals, which have previously remained hidden in private collections.



* Frank Bellamy's Heros the Spartan, from which all of today's art and text is excerpted, is now available from Book Palace Books

Frank Bellamy’s Heros The Spartan: "... pages and pages of pure joy"

Today, guest author Bryn Havord shares this excerpt from his upcoming four page feature on 'Frank Bellamy's Heros the Spartan', which will appear in issue five of illustrators quarterly (available mid November) ~ Leif

What a fantastic opportunity for a teenage boy: Art editor Arthur Roberts gave me my first job in Fleet Street, as a lettering artist on the thinking childs’ comics Eagle, Girl, Swift and Robin.

When one thinks of Eagle, Frank Hampson’s strip of Dan Dare and the Mekon immediately spring to mind.



However, Frank Bellamy who had worked for the comic producing ‘The Happy Warrior’, featuring the life of Winston Churchill, ‘The Shepherd King’, the life of the biblical King David, and ‘The Travels of Marco Polo’, amongst others, replaced Hampson and spent a year drawing Dan Dare, but his triumph for the comic was producing Heros the Spartan in 1962 and 1963.



Illustrators editor Peter Richardson has edited and designed a beautiful book entitled Frank Bellamy’s Heros the Spartan. Available in two luxurious editions measuring a gigantic 
11 x 14 inches, the deluxe limited edition of only 600 copies with 272 pages features a beautifully designed blue hard cover with embossed and varnished detailing. The leather bound and numbered edition, restricted to 120 copies, features a beautiful gold embossed red cover and slipcase, plus a tipped in numbered plate, and an additional 24 pages of some of the most stunning Heros originals, which have previously remained hidden in private collections.



It was a privilege to be invited to do some minor production work on the book, and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing Bellamy’s incredible artwork at close quarters once again. Richardson has excelled himself with the editing and in his powerful designs of introductory pages featuring Bellamy’s drawings in monochrome...



... in contrast to page after page of colourful spreads, many of which have been scanned from the originals.



There are forewords by John Byrne, Dave Gibbons, Walter Simonson, Ken Steacy, and John Watkiss, with an introduction by Norman Boyd, each giving their own views and insights into the working methods and life of this incredible artist. It is one of the best books of its kind that I have ever seen: pages and pages of pure joy. There must be plenty of us old codgers left who want to take this trip down memory lane, and 
I only hope that Geoff West, the publisher at Book Palace Books, has ordered enough copies to go round.

~ Bryn Havord

* Frank Bellamy's Heros the Spartan is now available from Book Palace Books