Frank Bellamy




I was two years old when the Shepherd King was published in 1958 so I never saw more than a few pages until the eighties. Dynamic and beautifully coloured.


Just two years later Frank Bellamy had the opportunity to indulge his passion for Africa with 'Fraser of Africa'. The animals are stunningly portrayed.



Heros the Spartan deserves its legendary status in comic history. The dynamism and mood of the art was, and still is, compelling.



Full colour Thunderbird's art sans captions. The quality of these images is clearly pretty poor but any real Frank Bellamy fan will want to see them. The original 3x4 photographs were taken by the artist for reference.



A 'monster' thumbnail drawn on tracing paper.



Two pencil roughs (one torn) for football spot illustrations.



The original sketch and final printed image which appeared in the first issue of the short lived Ally Sloper magazine.



A partially inked panel from a 'first draft' of the moon-landing spread published in the Daily Mirror.



The Winged Avenger from the similarly titled episode of the Avengers TV series. Pencils and incomplete inks.



A few examples that show the tremendous versatility of Frank Bellamy's illustrative style and design.



The later period of Frank Bellamy's tenure on the Garth newspaper strip is often given less regard than the earlier more detailed work but I find this work most exciting. The style, bolder and streamlined to survive the poor quality of printing and paper, still contains all of the strengths of the artists earlier work. In the strip above the line work and creases maintain a superficial 'reality' but also suggest movement as well as form-- while elegantly avoiding the cartoon extremes of other artists. (Note also the dramatic perspective of the balloon tails.)



The explosive movement of the rockslide above is suggested with an absolute minimum of detail. Less is certainly more.



The near silhouette ships racing across a featureless ocean. Minimalist and cleverly distorted to suggest movement rather than clunky distracting detail.To me, this seems like a similar evolution to that of Turner and we can only dream of how it might have continued.



This 'gunslinger' is another example of how (after having mastered form and colour) Frank Bellamy's focused on capturing movement and mood with absolute simplicity.



And as if more proof were needed-- The three page 'Swade' strip, that featured in 'Ally Sloper', is clearly an exercise in transferring a Sergio Leone gunfight into a stylish and dynamic comic form.



This spread appeared in the Daily Mirror newspaper to commemorate the moon landing. For anyone interested, Paul Holder is building a site dedicated to Frank Bellamy at: - http://www.frankbellamy.com/