The blog site http://cloud-109.blogspot.com is showcasing an impressive array of quality artwork including a serializing of Ron Embleton's Wulf the Briton from Express Weekly in 1959. This was simply one of the best adventure strips to have appeared in British comics and the hi-res scans have been cleaned up and presented large size for study. Artist Peter Richardson provides a commentary alongside the strips. As he says in his introduction to the series:
"Wulf the Briton was without doubt Ron Embleton's comic masterpiece, he took over the strip which was a single page cover feature on Express Weekly in 1957. As a result of Embleton's artistic input it went from being an OK'ish main feature to at least aesthetically speaking a rival to Frank Hampson's Dan Dare."
It's interesting to hear that Ron Embleton was paid £200 a week for drawing, painting, and lettering the strip, at a time when the average weekly wage in the UK was £12.
The strip has appeared on Peter's blog since last month and you can begin reading the first episodes here:
http://cloud-109.blogspot.com/2010/01/wulf-briton-forgotten-masterpiece.html
Subsequent chapters can be found here:
http://cloud-109.blogspot.com/search?q=wulf+the+briton
Peter hopes that one day the complete Wulf the Briton Ron Embleton strips can be collected into book form as they certainly deserve to be.
3 comments:
Many thanks Lew! Wow seeing these pages on your blog is weirdly even more exciting than seeing them on mine.
I'm posting the pages every Sunday and this Sunday's pages are seriously exciting as we're into Celtic civil war as Wulf and Venutius lay siege to the castle of Queen Cartamandua.
Several people have commented on the £200.00 per week that Embleton was paid, I actually got the story from an impeccable source, his agent Pat Kelleher of Temple Art, who as you can imagine was thrilled to have a talent such as Embleton on his books.
While moving my comic collection recently I rediscovered all those old Marvel UK reprint b&w weeklies with their weird (and needless to say often short lived) line ups.
One title I found was Forces In Combat, a sort of war comic, albeit one that also included Machine Man, Rom, Master Of Kung Fu, Kull, Nick Fury & Th Commandos, Rawhide Kid etc. Killer line up, eh.
Among the strips, and amazingly in full colour, is Wulf The Briton. The art looks lovely, but as you'd imagine the reproduction isn't great, but it's certainly readable.
Lew,
I must admit that I'd not heard of Peter's blog before you posted this article on Wulf the Briton.
Having now read back through his highly interesting and well informed articles I've bookmarked this blog and will visit it regularly. Fantastic stuff.
Thanks
Dave
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