Eaqle Times V24N01 Spring 2011

L Ashwell Wood was Eagle’s premier cutaway artist providing over 600 different painted cutaways for the weekly comic between 1950 and 1969. While some of these paintings have been reused in the recent Eagle reprint books published by Orion to date none of Wood’s original pencils for these Eagle cutaways have ever been published.

Earlier this year downthetubes’ Jeremy Briggs discovered the pencils for L Ashwell Wood’s cutaway of the Royal Navy destroyer HMS St Kitts which was published in Eagle Vol 1 No 46 dated 23 February 1951. These pencils are published for the first time, alongside the final version of the cutaway as printed in Eagle, as an A3 centrespread in the new issue of Eagle Times. In addition to the centrespread, Jeremy supplies a detailed article on L Ashwell Wood’s nineteen year career with Eagle comic.

Amongst other features in this new issue of Britain’s longest running comics fanzine are the first part of A Look at Luck examining Eagle’s Luck of the Legion, the French Foreign Legion strip written by Geoffrey Bond and drawn by Martin Aitchison, an examination of the real XCH-4 hydrofoil which inspired Frank Hampson’s hydrofoil designs in the Dan Dare story The Man From Nowhere, and writer Alan Vince’s memories of working for David Hunt, the first editor of new Eagle in the 1980s.