Britain
Frank Hampson
Frank Hampson · 1918–1985
- Classification
- Writer-artist. British. Pre-2000 AD megafauna.
- Habitat
- Eagle, 1950–1961
- Distinguishing marks
- Photographic realism built from studio models and posed assistants, gleaming spaceships, a square-jawed pilot with wiggly eyebrows, and a green villain whose head is mostly forehead
- Often seen with
- The Rev. Marcus Morris, Eagle's founder; studio artists including Harold Johns, Don Harley and Greta Tomlinson; Frank Bellamy, briefly
- Conservation status
- Stable. Titan's Dan Dare collections cover the Hampson years, though stock varies.
Field-guide card
Hampson was an illustrator in Southport when a vicar called Marcus Morris asked him to help create a new kind of comic for boys, one with the production values of an American Sunday page and a moral compass. The result was Eagle, launched in April 1950 with Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, on the front cover. Hampson ran a studio that built models of the spacecraft and posed his assistants in costume for reference, so that every panel had the solidity of a photograph. He was worn down by the relentless weekly schedule and the demands of his publishers, and left Dan Dare at the end of the 1950s.
You've seen his influence in almost every British vision of space travel from the 1950s onwards, and in the generation of British scientists and engineers who have said they were inspired by Dan Dare. His Mekon, the green-skinned dictator of Venus, is one of the great comic book villains, and has been parodied more often than any other.
The gateway drug is Dan Dare: The Complete Collection, Volume 1: The Venus Campaign, the first adventure in full. The deep end is "Reign of the Robots", in which Dan returns from a long voyage to find the Mekon has conquered Earth, the late high point of the Hampson studio. The curio is The Road of Courage, the life of Christ he drew for Eagle after leaving Dan Dare, which shows what his realism could do with a very different subject.
The Crowsnest verdict: the man who put Britain into space, a decade before anyone else managed it in real life.