Eric Parker - roughs (part 1 of 4)

I've long admired the art of Eric Parker (check out his Wikipedia entry here) who had a 50 year (!) career as a comic illustrator. He died in 1974 and left behind an enormous body of work that it's unlikely we'll ever be fully aware of. I'm certainly not aware of any comprehensive listing of his work - if one does exist I'd be delighted to have it pointed out to me.

I've recently been sent a whole stack of images that Parker created in his career. These cover many different topics and I'll gradually list them all on the blog. There are a lot of images so it's going to take some time. Anyway, you've got to start somewhere with this stuff.

I can't definitively say where this art was destined for - and none of the art gives me any clues - so I'll just speculate on where the art might have appeared. 

I've labelled this art as 'roughs' but plenty of the art is far from 'rough' so it's a rather loose descriptive term just to try and help me catalogue the images.

Sexton Blake looks at a beautiful suspect

Is this Sexton Blake's study?

These three rustic types are being spied on by a woman in the pub window. Again, is this from a Sexton Blake story?

This is definitely a rough - strong cheekbones on the man here make me think this is a Sexton Blake piece