on the shore of the ultimate sea

The first comics I ever read were in Eagle annuals. I had a stack of them, along with several loose Tiger and Lion collections, holdovers from my father’s postwar upbringing in England. He was a ten or so when he started getting them for Christmas, and I’d reckon I was shown the yellowing hardcovers around the same time.

For a young and inquisitive kid, the stack of Eagles was a treasure. They not only had a dozen or so multi-page strips in each, but they had adventure stories, how-to sections, science articles and all manner of interesting facts and illustrations. The attempts at humor were generally the worst kind of watery cabbage British stuff¹ , but otherwise they were solid gold, chock full of world-expanding stuff.

The annual book is a wonderful thing. It arrived (well, still does, apparently) in stores just in time for the holidays, an ideal present for the young imagination on your list. I’m not sure if my dad got the weekly comic; I’d imagine he picked one up now and again. But getting the annual every Christmas was a huge highlight. for many kids, it was likely the only book they received every year. The 1960 and 1961 annual was priced 10 s. 6 d., which shakes out to around £22 or $31.² That’s a lot for a book, and the Eagle was worth every penny.

The Eagle annuals were such a big part of my formative years, when I was home over the holidays I cracked open the books and decided to see how they looked after some time to grow up and see the world. I took photos of my favorite comics and illustrations and combined them into a Flickr collection, including a set of the whole Eagle Annual #7 from 1958. Before we get into the types of content they featured, a little history helps. I didn’t know any of this at the time but turning through the old pages and looking at them through this lens explains a lot.

Eagle began as the idea for a weekly comic around 1949, when a guy called Marcus Morris decided to expand his publishing repertoire. Morris had previously seen some success with The Anvil, a church newsletter that brought a more literary slant to the regular Sabbath communication, and he wanted to take on the moral cesspool corrupting children’s minds from the pesty hole of the American comics game (namely I’d imagine, EC Comics).

“Many American comics were most skilfully and vividly drawn, but often their content was deplorable, nastily over-violent and obscene, often with undue emphasis on the supernatural and magical as a way of solving problems,” Morris writes in the introduction to 1977’s Best of Eagle. “We had tried to start a paper which would be the natural choice of the child, but, at the same time, would have the enthusiastic approval of the parent and the teacher; in this we succeeded.”

The principal protagonist Morris envisioned as he shopped a dummy of the comic around town was “Lex Christian,” “who began life as a tough, fighting parson in the slums of the East End of London, became airborne, a flying padre, the Parson of the Fighting Seventh.” Lex, a real or created permutation, or a younger man showing similar character, is essentially the protagonist of nearly every Eagle yarn.

The Christian Superman angle was never very overt in the Eagle stories and strips, meaning there were never references to Christ’s love or the Power of God to Smith (except in a few biblical Old Testament comics or things like General Booth, Soldier of God about the founder of the Salvation Army). Sure, the heroes always did the right thing, and fought the bad guys, but that wasn’t such a strange notion for me when I read them as a kid.

Morris names Chad Varah, an Anglican priest who went on to found Samaritans suicide helpline as a principal scriptwriter in the Eagle series and scientific consultant of sorts to Dan Dare. I’d guess Varah had a significant role in writing stories for the book. Looking at all the bylines in Eagle I wonder how many different writers they had on staff and how they divvied up the work. The style never really changes. I’d imagine each staff writer had his section and was responsible for content in that section; illustrators for articles were generally more free-floating but the copy probably came from a few people under multiple bylines. If they got good submissions (once a particular section’s voice was established) they paid freelancers. Comics, of course, had to stay truer to one specific style, at least in the visual aspect.

So, cruising through the table of contents, Eagles had a few different easily discernible types of content.³

Stories: Generally these entailed some duty of the Crown leading stout, brave man or men to a strange place where an adventure would occur, as in Chinese Pirates (in which some dangerous coolies hijack a ship) or Jungle Drums. In Limey, a “wisp of a Britisher” proves his worth to the Chilean laborers that have been disparaging him and “everything that was British” when his birdlike appearance comes in handy. The White Devil sees the savage Huron take a dude prisoner in the Great Lakes region. In others types, a boy, sometimes accompanied by a friend, would display courage and stop some calamity. In The Friendly Ghost young Bengali boy Ram Das stands up to a tiger and wins when the beast steps on a buried ‘Jap’ landmine and meets a gruesome end.

Robot Archie dashes to the rescue

Adventure Strips: These were Eagle’s bread and butter. They put the asses in the seats, so to speak. Dan Dare was chief among these, the franchise player.⁴ Here he is in Space Race, one of the last annual appearance before cost-cutting forced a change in artists. To be honest, I wasn’t too crazy for Dan Dare, though he did have an awesome foil in the Mekon. Other big Eagle regulars were Luck of the Legion, western strip Riders of the Range, Jack O’Lantern and Storm Nelson (seen here in The Affair of the Queasy Cougar). My absolute favorite adventure strip was Robot Archie. He wasn’t an Eagle creation, rather came from Lion.⁵ Here’s Robot Archie’s Quest for the Stolen Juju, and here he is in The S.O.S. From the Forbidden City.

Sport: The Sport stories were a big component in Eagle, and generally could be characterized pretty easily, as instructional go-do-it pieces like So You Want to Go Fishing and Teach Yourself to Swim Underwater and stories about organizational, rules-type sport specific pieces, The Challenge of the Pentathalon, like Aim High in Athletics or Put a Kick in Your Soccer. Another variety is more athletic celebrity stuff, about famous races or athletes, like You Have To Be Tough, about the Monte Carlo rally and Jim Laker’s Secret

Real Life Adventures: These were typically historical stories crafted into a few pages worth of material, like Fritdjof Nansen, Explorer and Lover of Men or Log Cabin to White House, an account of Abe Lincoln’s rise to American President, retrofitted for comic-reading kids. (I’m not sure if Abe hisself ever actually fought a slave master.)

Hobbies: These were probably my favorite parts. I was big into tinkering and putting things together when I was a kid; to some extent I still am. But these articles centered around small projects and pursuits, from keeping birds and taming pigeons (Winged Messengers, Let’s Welcome the Birds) to predicting the weather (Be Your Own Weather Prophet). They tended to the crafty. Most years there was a balsa wood project (evidently this stuff used to be in great supply; see Kite-released Parachute and Sports Two-Seater. Other little construction projects included things like Silhouette Book Ends and Build Your Own Clipper Sledge. The graphic arts even got a turn occasionally, with things like Make Your Own Printing Set. In one edition I found a three-page spread on how to turn an extra shed in the back yard into a clubhouse, including fashioning hinged cubbys and making seating and things like that. I pored over that for what must have been weeks thinking about the possibilities I could put in our yard. Alas, no shed, but it wasn’t long before lean-tos in the forest became a more rustic alternative. Stories like Camp on Your Own channeled that kids enthusiasm, turning it into concrete skills and knowledge they’d have when it came time for an adventure in the woods. As a kid another of my most treasured volumes was The American Boys Handy Book, a totally essential compendium of young pioneer-y wisdom, from rafts to knots to animal traps. It’s an absolute classic and one I should probably rebuy before I start to miss it too much.

Engineering: Another fun way the Eagle appealed to kids was with its Engineering section, which used diagrams to explain how things worked (like The Motor Cycle Engine and How A Telephone Works) or introduced illustrations of a series of things (Flying Wings and Tail-less Aircraft). The Engineering stories were like crack for young technical minds; they were always loaded with detail and complete. See, for instance, Railway Realities or Rails Across Canada, both illustrated by Walkden Fischer. I challenge you to read either of those and come away ten minutes later, despite the obvious advances in technology, feeling like you haven’t learned something. Even as a kid, though, the stuff about outer space was pretty dated. Not that we’d done so much, just the strange optimism that stories like Project Vanguard had about launching satellites into orbit (see above) or other rocket-based endeavors.

Humorous Strips: The blundering, perpetually befuddled Harris Tweed was the king of this type of Eagle fare, as well as Waldorf and Cecil, a tramp and his boy pal who, in the episode we’ve got, stumble into a rocket launching facility and are sent to Africa, where they’re subsequently captured by pygmies who intend on eating the white devils. A few strokes of the pen later and the pygmies are members of the British Commonwealth, the friends have found a mountain made of ice cream and everyone enjoys a regal banquet. Another fun little treat were third-page panels like Pedro and his amazing hat or Jeff.

Interest: This was the catch-all topic, from gauzy looks at life with a film crew (On Location) to more Mr. Wizard science stuff (Experiments with Inks). Some other good articles from #7 include Cleopatra’s Needle, Beating the Bank-Note Forger, Houses with Secrets and Across the Sea in Bottles

Nature: These were mostly pet-oriented stories about creatures, like . Sometimes they’d bend to the naturalist tip, with titles like Know Your Trees or Flight in Nature or Land of ‘Parrats’, about wildlife in Antarctica.

So that doesn’t seem so insidious after all, huh? Certainly compared to the comics you get from Revelations scholars in the subway are a little more politically loaded. Comics of the EC variety were certainly more exciting in that prurient, is-the-busty-lady-gonna-get-electrocuted way, but Eagle had its place, representing Big C Christian values with broad swathes of values like responsibility, honesty and bravery–never bad things for kids to learn about.

A quick Ebay search doesn’t turn up much from the 50s-60s turn, arguably the zenith of the title’s lifespan, but they’re probably not hard to find. I wonder what a kid around eight would make of an old Eagle Annual. Perhaps after the Internet it’s difficult to see as much value in things like those; as the Dude says, ‘Boy, how ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm once they seen Karl Hungus?’ The annuals still sell, as recent sales figures I linked to suggest, but for how long? At any rate, mine will stay in the bookshelf, ready for the next eager, imaginative fact-gobbler to pore over them and daydream away.

1. This is coming from a kid who had a whole shelf full of joke books yet still rejected the tin-eared Eagle stuff. There was something about most of it that just screamed Unfunny Uncle [↩]
2. based on Measuring Worth’s Relative Value of a UK Pound Amount in Relative Share of GDP. [↩]
3. In all of these, I’m linking to the large versions on Flickr. You should be able to click “Back to the Flickr photo page” and move on to the next page in the set. [↩]
4. Three sentences, three cliches, but hey, we’re talking pretty cliched comics. [↩]
5. Lion was more or less an Eagle knockoff, and Tiger was more geared towards the sporting set; I’ve got a few of em here to give you an idea. [↩]