A Frank Hampson & Don Harley panel from the 1959 Eagle Annual No. 8: Dan Dare in Operation Moss Frank Hampson (1918 - 1985) is best known for being the creator of Dan Dare. Image File history File links Dan_Dare_-_Operation_Moss_comic_panel. ...
Image File history File links Dan_Dare_-_Operation_Moss_comic_panel. ...
1918 (MCMXVIII) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar (see link for calendar) or a common year starting on Wednesday of the Julian calendar. ...
This article is about the year. ...
The return of the original Dan Dare in 1989 Dan Dare - Pilot of the Future is a classic British science fiction comic hero, created by Frank Hampson in 1950. ...
In 1975, at an international convention of strip cartoon and animated film artists, held at Lucca in Tuscany, Frank Hampson was voted prestigioso maestro. A jury of his peers gave him a Yellow Kid Award and declared him to be the best writer and artist of strip cartoons since the end of WW2.
This accolade is all the more remarkable since Hampson had only a ten-year career. In 1949, in collaboration with Christian vicar the reverend Marcus Morris, he took a new comic, Eagle, to the Hulton Press. In April the following year, a revised and improved version of his Eagle hit the bookstalls. The strip that sold the comic, which switched between 16 and 20 pages on alternate weeks, was Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future.
Hampson was born in Manchester in 1918. ‘War ended and I began’. He had a brother, Eric, (killed in WW2) and a sister, Margaret, who in April 2006 was still living in Hampson’s home town, Southport, Lancashire. Following (some say) Alex Raymond and Milton Caniff in USA, Hampson instigated a studio system, where as many a four artists might work on two pages of strip at any one time. The result was some incredibly detailed and inventive artwork, but also incredibly high bills. When Hulton was bought up, and Eagle moved to a new publisher (1959) Hampson’s studio was disbanded.
He had one last great strip to draw, The Road of Courage, his carefully researched and meticulously crafted Life of Christ. This was timed to end at Easter 1961. Hampson then began to devise seven other strip cartoon ideas, which he intended to offer to Eagle. But partly through his own mismanagement (he told no-one what he was doing) Longacre Press accused him of breach of contract. He was forced to resign, his new strips were impounded by the legal department, and he never drew for comics again. The reminder of his life was spent in ailing health and he died from a stroke and the lingering effects of throat cancer in 1985.
Trivia In 1978 he graduated from the Open University. Naturally he celebrated by drawing a Dan Dare strip for the University's internal magazine. The punch line of the script involved the University getting an application from the Mekon. The Open University (OU) is the UKs open learning university, established in 1969. ...
The Mekon was the arch-enemy of the British comic book hero Dan Dare, first appearing in 1950 in the Eagle comic. ...
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