A comic book hero’s
WE are celebrating the man who drew Dan Dare, Frank Hampson.
Frank Hampson was born in December 1918 in Audenshaw near Manchester but the following March he and his family moved to Southport.
He attended King George V Grammar School, left at 14 and started working in the Post Office.
At 19 he began to study full time at The Victoria College of Arts & Science.
He had enrolled on a design course there but in 1939 he was called up and joined the Royal Army Service Corp.
He was rescued Dunkirk in 1940.
By 1944 he had been commissioned lieutenant of his unit and was landed in Normandy.
That same year he married Dorothy Mable Jackson and at the end of the war returned safely to her in Southport.
He became a member of the Southport School of Arts and Crafts and began working as an artist.
During this time, he won a competition held by Southport Borough Council, by creating a poster to promote Southport as a seaside holiday destination.
In 1947 he and Dorothy had their son, Peter.
He also set up a silk-screen, colour-printing business with fellow student Harold Johns.
The idea to produce a comic was that of local parish Vicar, at St James’ Birkdale, Marcus Morris.
He wanted to depart from the violence he saw in comics, at the time, and impart the strip with Christian values.
He and Frank began working together on this concept in 1949.
Incredibly, early artwork survives of ‘Chaplain Dan Dare, the first parson in space’!
However, by the time the first copies of the Eagle hit bookstalls in April 1950 the most popular strip was ‘Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future’. Hampson’s interest in space exploration came from his time in the army, it is thought that he had ambitions of joining the RAF and in 1953 wrote, “On the quays of Antwerp you could watch the birth of Space Travel”.
Realising what a hit they had, Morris knew they must start employing more artists full time to cope with the workload.
He hired Bruce Cornwell, Terry Maloney, Jocelyn Thomas and Eric Eden as well as making others, including
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Frank’s friend Harold Johns who had previously been working on another of Morris’ publications ‘Anvil’, part of the team.
The unlikely office for this team was in a former bakery on Botanic Road, Churchtown. Known as ‘The Bakehouse Studio’ it was short on space, reportedly very cold and so was not beloved by the artists at the time.
Nevertheless, it was the birthplace of many Dan Dare stories as well as several other strips running in the Eagle.
An exploded drawing of the Bakehouse was produced by Graham Bleathman for Spaceship Away (a Dan Dare fanzine).
Before long it became clear that larger premises were essential for the growing team and workload.
It was decided to move the whole studio closer to their publishers in London.
So, in 1951 the entire studio team and three generations of the Hampson family moved to Epsom, in Surrey.
The artistic process was full on, 24/7, particularly for Frank.
His exacting eye and attention to detail were always recognisable in his work.
He held a sense of duty to his readers, largely young boys, to get things right and often included labelled diagrams.
In the early days when Frank was writing the stories himself, he would come up with the concept over the weekends and complete two ‘rough’ pages, drawn in high detail in pencils, sometimes not far from finished when he used inks.
Then two days were devoted to the team posing, photographing and developing each scene, leaving only three days in which to create that week’s art. Each artist, including Frank, would then be allocated frames to produce the finished Dan Dare artwork, using the photographs and studio aids.
Hampson would usually take the first page, as it would be the Eagle‘s cover.
Part of his meticulousness was his commitment to realism, and this is what lead to the practice of creating reference material to draw from.
He had to have a prop in front of him or people who were dressed as various characters in the Dan Dare comic strip.
Sometimes he’d photograph them and work from that.
Family members and studio artists alike were expected to model and pose for photographs and drawings in order to ensure the complete accuracy of each action frame.
His son Peter modelled for Cadet Flamer Spry, Greta Tomlinson was Miss Peabody.
One of the early images we have acquired from the Peter Hampson collection is a drawing from 1947, of Frank’s father, who became the model for Sir Hubert Guest, Controller of Space Fleet.
We even think that the original character design for Dan Dare was based on Frank himself!
Later models and busts of the main characters were produced.
The Atkinson holds several originals and recreations of the props he would work from.
At first, they were all homemade in Blue Peter style with cartons and bottles stuck together and then spray painted.
We have three good prototypes of the space craft that appear in the various strips, a