EXTRACTS: PIRATE TALES Fleetway Picture Library Classics © 2020 Book Palace Books * 272 PAGES IN FULL EDITION

3 Introduction PIRATE TALES There seems to be nothing in the world of commercial art that Philip Mendoza wouldn’t attempt and, in so doing, succeed triumphantly. After all, there can’t be many artists who can claim to have successfully illustrated both Kenneth Graham’s ‘The Wind in the Willows’ and Sax Rohmer’s ‘The Island of Fu Manchu’! Seemingly without effort, Philip Mendoza moved easily between all types of graphic illustration. His posters were simple, strong and imaginative; his paperback crime covers were sexy and tough; his western covers colourful and full of action and his science fiction covers suitably weird and fantastic. His later work for the nursery end of the market captured the necessary atmosphere of magical whimsy. Few illustrators are capable of tackling so many diverse subjects with such extraordinary aplomb. Philip Mendoza was of Spanish stock and, like his famous ancestor, Daniel Mendoza, the renowned bare-knuckle pugilist of the Regency period, he was strongly built. He took to wearing brightly coloured neckerchiefs, which, together with his swarthy complexion, gave him a romantic, gypsy-like appearance. His colleagues at the Amalgamated Press recalled Mendoza as extremely likeable but somewhat eccentric. According to his family he always spent more money than he made and certainly lived life to the full. Montague Phillip Mendoza was born in Dalston, London, on 14 October 1898, the son of Alfred Moses Mendoza, an artist, painter and sculptor. Philip spent much of his early childhood in Nice, a place he wryly described as “a kind of French Budleigh Salterton”. Eventually his father, who was working as an “itinerant portrait painter”, found that commissions were beginning to dry up and decided to return to England. The family moved first to Manchester, where young Philip tried to make it as a pavement artist, and then to Newcastle, where he found work as a pit boy in a coal mine. At the outbreak of World War 1, however, at the age of 17, he signed up as an infantryman in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and crossed to France to what he described as “a life of mud, lice and hunger in Flanders fields”. Fortunately, Philip Mendoza was not destined to end the war in the trenches and he was enrolled in a concert party, painting scenery. As he said, “My ability to draw saved my bacon”. At the end of the War, Mendoza obtained a state grant to attend the King Edward VII School of Art in Newcastle, where he completed a four- year course in two years. In Newcastle he began working for an advertising agency and later for a printing firm specialising in theatrical posters. Arriving in London he worked as a political cartoonist on the Labour magazine, The New Leader , drew sketches for the Daily Herald and the Weekly Graphic and became staff illustrator for the Evening Standard . All through his career, Mendoza rejoiced in a large array of pen names but probably the first was ‘Flam’, which he used when he drew his popular cartoon strip, ‘The Man You’d Like to Kick’, for the Sunday Express . Much later, in the 1940s, he submitted this character to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. They liked the idea but wanted a more sympathetic character of ‘the little man’ type and so ‘Percy Vere’ was born, featuring in a most successful series of posters. Years later, in the 1960s, Mendoza was to find himself illustrating yet another cartoon character for the Society: ‘Tufty’, for the nursery comic, Treasure . The work for which he is most noted – his paperback covers and his comic strips – began sometime in the mid-1940s when he met publisher Stephen D. Frances for whom he designed and drew a large size, full colour comic called The Mighty Atom . It was this comic that was to start Mendoza off on the road that he was to follow for the rest of his life. Nothing quite like The Mighty Atom had appeared before or since and it must have surprised and delighted its readers. The artwork was spectacular as was the colour printing and the large size pages. Probably due to the fact that it cost three times more than PHILIP MENDOZA