9 May 2017

Lost Reginald Heade comic strip discovered? Can you help?

Telos (here) recently published the fantastic 'The art of Reginald Heade' volume, which while, naturally, focusing on Heade's paperback covers also delves a little into his rarely seen comic strip artwork. There's a review of the book here (written by me it has to be said).

Stephen Walker also published a sort of 'companion' article on Down the Tubes (here) digging a little more deeply into the comic artwork that Heade had produced. Stephen's sources were from well-respected publications, but in most cases more research was required to define precise start date, end date & even titles.

As Stephen notes in the article "...Alan Clark's Dictionary of British Comic Artists, Writers and Editors (British Library, 1998) noted Heade's work appeared in the 1940s and early 1950 in Knockout and Sun weeklies". He is able to identify strips that appeared in Knockout but as he says later in the article "...I have been unable to find any evidence of Heade having contributed to Sun, the other comic mentioned by Clark".

However, the Illustrated Comic Journal (#30, Winter 1995)

contains a long article by David Ashford on the many distinguished artists who have drawn Robin Hood over the years. He includes in his selection this excerpt from Sun comic dated 6th November 1956, drawn, he says, by Reginald Heade.
So the challenge is - do you have any copies of Sun magazine from that time that could be passed to Stephen for review to see if he can confirm that this is the missing Robin Hood strip he has been searching for for many years?

Leave a comment here or over on the Facebook page.



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