RIP David Slinn

 

Swift 9 October 1954

My correspondent and dear friend David Slinn has passed away at the age of 88.

Steve Holland will say more as he puts together an obituary but I just wanted to share how helpful David was to me. I always felt a fraud  - an amateur sleuth - when talking to him, the professional, but he never ever made me feel as if I didn't have an opinion and knowledge worth sharing. He encouraged me to get the facts right. He was supportive in all my efforts to record the smallest details of illustrators and comic artists. He was so kind sharing scans of Raymond Sheppard's comic work and identifying Frank Bellamy's work in Swift - especially confirming with personal knowledge that Bellamy did indeed draw "The missing lynx" - his usual flare for puns coming into each email subject line! We learned that he quietly "drifted away  at 08:50 this morning" - Wednesday 22 October 2025.  

I wondered how to pay him tribute and felt the best way was to show you some of his writing about Frank Bellamy. All the writing below is David - and you'll see how broad his knowledge was of artists and writers from the late Eagle period. Rest in peace dear friend. You will certainly be missed.

Eagle Vol. 9:39, (27 September 1958)

"...[all this is ] related to the events during the early 1950s, I had avidly followed as a young – but especially motivated – reader.  However, around the time Frank was working on the opening episodes of ‘The Adventures of the Swiss Family Robinson’, following some tentative correspondence – and an encouraging response from both Michael Gibson and Arthur Roberts – the lucky outcome was a chance to begin to learn about things from the inside.  Early visits to Shoe Lane were, obviously, only occasional – but the aim was to, maybe one day, get a break into the world of children’s publications.

Anyway – so as not to get diverted from the main path – suffice to say (following a suitable period of youthful enthusiasm and study, plus just perceptibly improving artwork samples), a couple of life’s more fortunate coincidences resulted in my becoming a regular caller at the Hulton Press offices.  I started by doing freelance balloon-lettering and minor artwork tasks, for all four publications.  Clearly working for Eagle, and its companion titles Girl, Swift and Robin, was pretty heady stuff – but, for a callow newcomer, one of the most important aspects was a chance to see the newly delivered artwork.

 

Being a “new boy”, still in my late-teens (and the world being a rather different place to that which exits now), I remained slightly in awe of it all for the first few weeks.  There were established contributors coming in with scripts and artwork, but any introductions were brief and they weren’t really there just to chat to the likes of me.  Even so, gradually over the months I got to know some of them, including Frank, but these encounters were not only random but also tended to be quite spaced out.

Eagle Vol.10:19 (9 May 1959)

This period provided a memorable opportunity to properly study (if only briefly) some of Frank’s episodes of ‘The Happy Warrior’ – and hopefully gain some crucial insight to just how he achieved them.  (Actually, of course, by simply applying himself to the task in hand and doing the very best job he could in the time available?)  Probably, I saw more pages of ‘The Shepherd King’, than any of his other series; but certainly remember the start of ‘The Travels of Marco Polo’, and especially the artwork which included the, full-page width, desert panorama looking across the sand dunes.  Then, of course, this was when Frank found himself drafted onto ‘Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future’, and Peter Jackson was recalled to the Eagle back-page feature to take on the remainder of Marco Polo’s adventures.

 

One of the most striking things about Frank’s weekly pages, apart from the consistently high quality of both the draughtsmanship and graphic content, was the presentation.  Each finished board, complete with a protective overlay, used to arrive in its own coloured, heavy-cartridge folder, with the accompanying script tucked inside.  The appropriate details, title, episode/issue number, instructions etc., were all neatly lettered in architectural-style at the foot of the artwork.  That’s not to say other contributors didn’t also take care to protect their weekly endeavours from careless handling, but no-one came close to being so immaculate.  Of course, another distinctive thing about his work in those early years, was the fact that he always lettered the captions and speech-balloons – and, at the start of each new series, drew the title panel with the main lettering in place.  As far as I know, none of the other strip-artists tried their hand at this – but (sensibly) expected the art staff to letter the title piece.  Later on, when patching speech-balloons and captions became the more frequently used method of production – and weekly episodes ran to two, or more, pages – even Frank thought better of it. 

 

Something that is worth touching upon, and may be of constructive interest, is a little of the background to his time working for Swift.  Certainly on more than a few occasions, I have heard others querying why it took so long for Frank to get into the pages of Eagle.  Naturally, they are making this observation with the hindsight of knowing what happened to his career after he’d made such an impact with his work on ‘The Happy Warrior’ – and the fact that it rapidly went from strength to strength.

What seems to have been forgotten – or perhaps some of these exponents of “what-if and why-didn’t?” aren’t even aware of – is that when Frank first joined the Hulton weeklies in 1954, it already was the place to be.  The existing line-up on Eagle was pretty impressive: fronted by the Frank Hampson team at Epsom, it also included John Worsley, Frank Humphris, Martin Aitchison, Richard Jennings, Harold Johns and Norman Williams, with Robert Ayton not so far away over the 1955 horizon.  Not really much room for manoeuvre there?  As well, already on Swift, there was Harry Bishop, Giorgio Bellavitas and Patrick Williams, soon to be joined by Cecil Orr and Jim Holdaway (the two of them also having contributed to different series on Mickey Mouse Weekly).

Eagle Vol.8:51 (20 December 1957) 

It is interesting that, although the paper was the least successful of Marcus Morris’s creations and catered for a junior readership, Swift didn’t suffer from a lack of quality illustrators.  Apart from those already mentioned, William Backhouse drew a long-running, animal adventure series on the centre-spread, Alfred Mazure took over from Jim Holdaway when he went off to do ‘Romeo Brown’ for the Daily Mirror, and later came Harry Lindfield, Peter Jackson, Cecil Doughty, Don Lawrence and Neville Colvin.

One aspect, which may have occurred to you while researching this project, is to what extent events were influenced by the unexpected death of Norman Williams, at the beginning of 1957, while he was nearing the end of his work on ‘The Great Sailor’.  Simply from memory now, I do recall a conversation with Arthur Roberts about the circumstances surrounding Peter Jackson’s somewhat hasty christening as a back-page contributor on ‘The Great Explorer’, the story of David Livingstone.  In contrast, the careful preparation that went into Frank’s collaboration with Clifford Makins on ‘The Happy Warrior’, though extraordinarily thorough, was a somewhat more leisurely business.