Frank Bellamy Checklist Website and Blog: SPECIAL: Alan Davis on the 50th Anniversary of Frank Bellamy's passing

Today is the fiftieth anniversary.

On 5 July 1976, on one of the hottest days of the hottest weather for centuries in 1976, Frank Bellamy passed away. To remember this special 50th anniversary of his passing, the artist and writer, Alan Davis, has kindly written some comments on the inspiration he draws from Frank Bellamy.

"As a youngster I loved comics but never considered what was involved in their creation. In happy ignorance I attempted to imitate the imagery with the limited materials at hand. I remember "Heros the Spartan" being a particular favourite but I wouldn’t have been able to identify why Heros stood out from the other wonderful fully painted strips published in the sixties.

"Heros the Spartan", Eagle Vol.16 No.21 [22 May 1965]

When the "Thunderbirds" strip first appeared in TV Century 21 it was obvious to all that Bellamy’s use of colour was remarkable. The sense of scale and fiery devastation never appeared to be abstract yet the dynamism and explosive movement relied on what was often only implied. Fully three-dimensional aircraft blasting through atmospheric haze all blurred with speed. The techniques had always been there but Bellamy’s ability to make the puppet show stars, five colourful spaceships, appear real.

"Thunderbirds" TV21 #67 (28 April 1966)

"Thunderbirds" TV21 #57 (19 February 1966)

"Thunderbirds" TV21 #143 (14 October 1967), p.19

"Thunderbirds" TV21 #105 (21 January 1967)

"Thunderbirds" TV21 #146 (4 November 1967), p/16 Original Art

Sadly, full colour comic strips had become financially unviable so Frank moved on to a black and white newspaper strip, "Garth". Many Bellamy fans mourned the loss of colour but I came to believe the limitations of a daily strip revealed the real depth of Frank’s skills and he produced some of his very best work.

I never met Frank. I didn’t even try despite the fact he lived less than four miles from my home and I regularly passed his bungalow on a bus. I assumed such a successful comic creator wouldn’t want to be bothered by a local yob who had some questions.

Over a decade later David Lloyd asked me to represent the Society of Strip Illustration (SSI) and help Frank’s widow, Nancy, who was moving house, to clear out Frank’s studio. In the years after Frank’s death various dealers had cherry picked the original pages and other, less informed or uncaring assistants, had heaped photographs, documents, old scripts, partially finished pages, roughs and sketches—most of which were torn up and left to marinate in a cocktail of coffee dregs and photographic chemicals. It was heartbreaking.

After I had catalogued the remaining Garth strips and odd pieces of original art, Nancy asked me to dispose of the large bin bags. She looked at me as if I was crazy when I asked if I could take the ‘rubbish’ home with me. Nancy laughed when I opened the sacks to assure her I wasn’t smuggling out any real treasures.

My wife was far less amused when I arrived home with the sacks of toxically smelly rubbish. There was no way I was going to take them into the house. Fortunately, it was a warm summer evening so I emptied the sacks on the patio and searched through the mess. It was truly a roller coaster experience. Finding a pristine piece of a sketch then discovering the other parts sodden and disintegrating. In retrospect I regret disposing of the torn sketches which, with modern technology, could have been scanned and reassembled but, worse still, ignoring all of the typed pages, mostly business letters or scripts, because I was totally focused on finding any clean drawings and photographs before the sun went down.

Regular visitors to this site or my Frank Bellamy tribute page will be familiar with the most interesting bits I managed to preserve. Some are self-explanatory, others are only suggestive or present more questions than answers. Over the years, I would visit Nancy so had an opportunity to pick her brain but her recollections were sometimes unreliable because she saw herself as Frank’s business manager and took no interest in the creative process.
In addition to the usual challenges of a freelance illustrator, full colour comics had a number of technical considerations such as Infra-red photography and colour separation. Processes to be understood and endured rather than creatively exploited. A can of worms for another day.

A reliance on photographic references was common in the 50’s, as comic illustrators wrestled with the possibilities of the still relatively new comic medium-- which evolved a vocabulary of imagery that would inform subsequent generations of illustrators. Nancy told me she would dread any day Frank went to deliver a job in London because he’d always return with books and magazines - some for a reference on a current job, others because they might be handy for a future project.

Photos were incredibly scarce compared to the near infinite availability of the internet. Nancy often served as a model and Frank would photograph himself in a mirror, acting out a facial expression or pose.

Frank poses and appears in Garth: "Ghost Town (G152) &
"The Ministry of Fear", Radio Times,7-13 July 1973

Frank poses for Garth: "Ghost Town" (G130)

Frank even photographed TV broadcasts of wildlife, historical dramas and action movies. (Frank also used drawings of models from his life study class-- at least two of the Atacama poses in the "Mask of Atacama" story) Possibly the most creative solutions for unusual references was jacking up a car to create a dramatic angle for a speeding car.

Bellamy's photos of a Morris Minor 6 cwt van

Original art of the above used on the cover of
Sunday Times Magazine 13 September 1970

Sunday Times Magazine 13 September 1970

Some might wonder why Frank found it necessary to expend so much time and effort to photograph something fairly unremarkable like a crease in clothing and then reduce it to a stylised shape.

David Bellamy

Nancy Bellamy

[All the above appeared in Bellamy's first Sunday Times assignment "The Weary Pilgrimage of Fred Blenkinsop", Sunday Times Magazine -5 October 1969. I'll cover this issue in a future post ~ Norman]

Detail and accuracy were obviously important to Frank and he was undoubtedly a perfectionist. Where most illustrators would make a correction with gouache or a patch, Frank would redraw an entire page if dissatisfied with one part of it. I saw a ‘first draft’ of the Daily Mirror Moon Landing spread torn up in the trash bags I recovered. Unfortunately, only one small corner was salvageable.

Lunar Module - notice the astronauts in pencil

"07.17 BST, JULY 21, 1969 : FOOTSTEPS ON THE MOON" (without numbered stages)
Daily Mirror 11 July 1969

Nancy told me that she had witnessed Frank reject many other pages including Garth strips but I never found any actual redrawn art aside. There were a few photos that confirm there was a conflict between Frank and the writer or editorial and interference with Frank’s work but that has been covered a number of times elsewhere… But here are two brief examples.

K17 Garth: The Beautiful People - as published

K17 Garth: The Beautiful People - typed script

K17. As Frank notes the panel description is ridiculous. Four beats in a single frame. It’s concerning that after four years Frank is still dealing with such basic errors.

K20 Garth: The Beautiful People - as published

K20 Garth: The Beautiful People - typed script

K20, Frank ignores the writer padding out an image with unnecessary detail. Perhaps retaliation for K17?
Only recently did I consider that by focusing on the office politics and how it affected Frank’s work I had ignored something far more significant. Frank’s storytelling skill. Especially within the very limited three panel newspaper strip format.

G165 Garth: The Mask of Atacama - with John Allard pencils below

The alternate Mask of Atacama title strip (G165) demonstrates Frank’s unique design and creativity. The pencil layout Frank ignored had a longshot of an Aztec pyramid with a suggestion of a human sacrifice on top. Frank’s stylish design is beautiful, very appropriate to the story and far more eye catching. But, what I want to focus on here is the second panel layout. In the pencilled rough Garth is facing left, his body a bland feature separating the panel in two, with Lumière and Olivares clumsily sandwiched between slabs of text. By turning Garth to face right, the text caption neatly fits Garth’s bland bulk, so Garth and the mask lead the viewers eye to the background figures of Lumière and Olivares-- who are clearly reclining on some sort of big sofa—implied rather than seen. This is consummate storytelling and minimalism. The text layout also looks and reads more evenly across the strip.

G274 Garth: The Wreckers - with alternate balloon placements

There are other examples of Frank using balloon placement as additional punctuation and pacing. G274, Frank merges the first two panels and uses elongated balloon tails to add a sense of movement and perspective.

G279 Garth: The Wreckers - with John Allard's pencils below

The layout on G279 is changed. The second panel, looking over Garth’s shoulder to Andromeda and Hurley. In the centre panel, Frank switches angles to deliver a heroic close-up on Garth. The text is broken up to give additional punctuation and a more interesting flow.
When the Garth book two was published by Titan in 1985, a comic fan acquaintance cited "The Women Of Galba" as the period Frank’s work began to decline. I don’t agree although it is true Nancy told me she ‘encouraged’ Frank to put less work into to Garth because the page rate didn’t justify the amount of time involved and she knew Frank was constantly disappointed and frustrated by tight deadlines and the poor quality of newsprint reproduction. I believe Frank was used to deadline pressure, and was always a minimalist and continued to evolve that principle throughout his career.

The Titan book presents the draft synopsis, the script and final art for the four strips (F305-G1.) to show the evolution of the story. In my opinion this is far from the best example of how to develop an idea into a publishable strip. The draft Synopsis has three full paragraphs describing a ‘backstory’ that should underpin the narrative. As emphasised in a not-- ‘N.B. All of the foregoing would take a sequence of only about ten days to establish, and it could be intershot with Garth sequences on Earth so as to keep him in the picture.’ Having the star of the strip early in the story is always an editorial concern. The published sequence of F304 to strip G5 has the title panel followed by a succession of single, two or three panel sequences. A dozen scene changes in nine strips and absolutely nothing of the ‘backstory’ outlined in the synopsis. Unfortunately, we don’t have the script to compare with the published F304 so can only speculate what ‘backstory’ was ever included in the script. Whatever the case, Frank could easily have drawn a wider shot to introduce the alien world as he had done on many occasions previously but it would have taken more space than a single panel.

Garth Book Two: The Women of Galba, 1985, p.4

Garth Book Two: The Women of Galba, 1985, p.5

Garth Book Two: The Women of Galba, 1985, p.6

Garth Book Two: The Women of Galba, 1985, p.7

[The above 4 pages appeared in the Titan Books reprint of 1985, for further details click here]

Anyone lucky enough to have seen Frank’s original colour pages will know they always look significantly more impressive than the published pages. Even the best reproduction process loses some degree of subtlety and definition. The same is true of the blackline Garth originals. It’s easy to forget how poor the newspaper reproduction was because the high-quality Titan reprint volumes captured all of the detail and effort Frank put into the strip— particularly the early episodes like Sundance and the Cloud of Balthus.
One thing it is important to remember, when Frank started work on Garth, no one ever envisaged a time when the strips would be collected in a volume—especially one with magazine quality printing. I don’t believe Frank dropped his standards. He adapted to the limitations of the medium. Frank’s dedication to testing the possibilities of the comic form is clearly evident in his short story Swade. The focus isn’t on linework or rendering techniques it’s about storytelling.

All 3 pages of "Swade" from Ally Sloper #1, 1976

Garth: The Beautiful People (J282-J284), The location can be described in a few words ‘a rave up in a London Penthouse’ because it’s something with which we are familiar—from films or TV. Glamorous faces, like cut outs from Vogue, cleverly add illustrate the title and set a mood for the story.

J282-J284 Garth: The Beautiful People

Garth: The Beautiful People (J292-J294), Locations. A perfectly minimalist near silhouette of a plane in a dramatic sky. Buildings and a car that immediately suggest modernity and wealth. A phone call made clandestine by partially obscuring a man on a phone with window blinds.

J292-J294 Garth: The Beautiful People

Garth: The Beautiful People (K4-K5), A churning sea and boat wake defined by space and patterns. Just enough essential information to allow a viewer to fill in the gaps.

K4-K5 Garth: The Beautiful People

Garth: The Beautiful People (J298-J299), Locations created by overlapping simple elements and surface patterns—or the front of an expensive car.

J298-J299 Garth: The Beautiful People

Garth: The Beautiful People (K9-K10), Perhaps the payoff to all of Frank’s analysis of creases. Frank seems to ignore the rules about identifying stress points when drawing creases and uses flourishes and abstractions to create another type of reality.