Frank Bellamy and Frank Hampson must be two greatest artists that Eagle employed, and it would be both invidious and imposssible to rate one above the other : impossible because their styles and approaches were so very different.
Bellamy was born inKettering, Northamptonshire, in 1917. He was called up for war service in 1939, spending much of his time painting aircraft recognition pictures. He was employed by various comics, then by Swift [a junior version of Eagle], before moving onto Eagle itself. He worked for the Daily Mirror after leaving Eagle, and died of a heart attack in July 1976.
There are 5 pages of artwork :
> Dan Dare [also linked to the Dan Dare essay page]
His Dan Dare work remains very controversial amongst the fans : he is hated firstly for having dared to take over from the Master, and secondly because he didn't draw the strip as Hampson had. He took over in the middle of a story [Terra Nova] and also drew its sequel, Trip to Trouble. But then he was given the editorial brief to revamp the strip - to update it - and as he himself said, if that's what the editor wants, that's what you do. But FH's carefully built up files/models etc were discarded.
All of this wasn't helped by the weak scripts he was given [by Eric Eden] [tho I like Nimbus unitl the end]. The other great snag was that he was working with two other ex-Hampson team artists, Keith Watson and Don Harley [altho KW soon left]. FB was not a team worker, but an individualist. The styles clashed horribly - usually in the same issue and sometimes on the same page! He was happy to be relieved of the strip and move on to the much more congenial Fraser of Africa.
Personally, if I couldn't have FH drawing Dan Dare, then I'd take Bellamy - providing it was just Bellamy ... and I rather liked his modernisations [which effectively disappeared with him]
Frank Bellamy.
Nicholas Hill 3 October 1996.
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