Monday, December 15, 2008

Fraser of Africa


A few months ago I posted some Flash Gordon Sunday pages. When I bought the magazines they came from I also picked up some old copies of Eagle. One of them had this great Frank Bellamy page...

10 comments:

  1. The whole strip (I think) was collected ages ago by Hawk Books -- worth tracking down a copy if you can. Beautiful colour work throughout. Africa was something of an obsession with Bellamy, several Thunderbirds strips in TV21 are set there.

    If you like this, check out this spread from an unpublished King Solomon's Mines strip for Eagle: http://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=221135&GSub=12998

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  2. Thanks for that John, lovely stuff.
    I've got that Fraser book and the Churchill one he did. I'm a big fan of Bellamy's. I bought a couple of Garth dailies from that exhibition Acme Comics held in Brixton about twenty years ago.

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  3. Wow. Thanks for sharing this. Truly inspiring.

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  4. Years ago a friend gave me one of Bellamy's Garth dailies... one of my most cherished originals. Thank God I saved all my Bellamy Heros the Spartan double page spreads before all my early Eagle comics collection was thrown out by my Mum, but his Fraser of Africa period is really something else again. I can still remember exactly the feeling of getting my hands on each issue as it arrived in New Zealand...

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  5. Bellamy was amazing wasn't he. I also loved the detail in the brilliant panel comps he did for Garth.

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  6. It would be great to see the Heros the Spartan stuff collected. Almost everything else of Bellamy's has been.

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  7. As I've got most of the Heros spreads, and someone recently gave me a copy of his Fraser of Africa book (surely Bellamy's best work?) I'd love to see the Montgomery of Alamein pages again. i don't think that story has ever been reprinted.... it would really make a terrific book doubled with the Churchill strip....

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  8. Colin, the Monty pages were included with the Churchill story in a book called High Command published by Dragon's Dream in 1981. ISBN 90 6332 851 6 for the hardcover.

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  9. An original printing from 1958 of the Churchill strips in hardcover is listed on amazon.co.uk

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  10. As a sort of service to those who can't afford or have trouble hunting down Bellamy comics from the 50s and 60s, I've linked to a reprints list within my site http://www.frankbellamy.co.uk
    If you type this address in your browser you'll get there directly:
    http://www.frankbellamy.co.uk/notes/reprints.htm
    And I always add illos to my blog (http://frankbellamy.blogspot.com/) entries - not as frequent as yours but hey....
    All the best

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