Sticking with British Cartoonists for a moment...

...my cartoonist chums Mike Lynch and Grant Miehm (sorry Grant, can't find Captain Scarlet yet) will get a real kick out of these, and for those of you who are new to Frank Bellamy's work it'll introduce you to more of his awesome talent and I thought we'd widen the net a little to include some Great British cartoonists who I'll blog about in the weeks to come:

When TV21 started running Star Trek, Frank Bellamy drew covers for the series. These were later dropped to allow more space for the stories which were illustrated by several artists including Harry Lindfield and Jim Baikie during a run that lasted for over 250 issues. Fans of the series, like Mike Lynch, can find details about reprints and the like, here at Rich Handley's site.

The printed comics themselves, TV21, Look and Learn, Eagle, etc, were a thing of wonder. The colours were vibrant and the artwork was often spectacular, none more so than Frank Bellamy's; but his originals were many, many times better. This is not often the case nowadays, as we can cut corners and add filters and cut and paste and shrink individual characters and panels and generally make the printed pages look a lot better than our originals. We can also go straight from pencil to colour in Paintshop or Painter or Illustrator, in short, we have things a little easier today, if we choose, than they did back in the day. A quick look at the Frank Bellamy collection on Comic Art fans, shows a little of what we are sometimes missing today:

From the collections of Chris Power, Terry Doyle, Jaume Vaquer and Paul Stephenson

You know, as I look at these and look at the other British cartoonists, many of whom were Spanish, it occurs to me that we really did have a Golden Age that gave birth to 2000AD which went on to launch the careers of many of our cartoonists in the US. Our culture, here in the UK, has last much in the last few decades. It's a pity we didn't cherish the work and reward the creators accordingly while that Golden Age lasted. In many ways we are graphically-illiterate philistines in the UK.