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

7 Introduction PIRATE TALES Of all the picture strip artists contributing to the Thriller Comics Library during the 1950s and ‘60s, the most prolific was an ex-Inland Revenue tax inspector named Robert Forrest. His considerable talent and enormous output showed him to be adept at all genres, from westerns through to pirate and highwayman stories and eventually to the chilling menace of ‘Victorian Gothic’. Robert Forrest was well into his forties when he first came into the field of comic strip illustration and his entry came about in rather an unusual manner. In the late 1940s, he was working for the Inland Revenue and had by chance been responsible for the income tax returns of a number of the artists, writers and editors who were working for the Amalgamated Press. According to editor Leonard Matthews, “Seeing that some considerable sums were being paid to these people, Bob took upon himself to write in to the Amalgamated Press to say – ‘Guess what? I’m a tax inspector but I can also draw adventure strips!’ We started to use him – and very good he was too.” At the time, another of the Amalgamated Press editors, Edward Holmes, was working on a series of western comics that were being published in Australia and he started to try Forrest out on strip adventures featuring the buckskin-clad frontier scout, Kit Carson. Then, early in 1950, Holmes had the idea of trying out this series of strip comics over here and, in April of that year, the first of the small format picture strip ‘libraries’ were launched under the title of Cowboy Comics . It was not, however, until the April of the following year that British readers first saw Robert Forrest’s work. His first strip to appear in the Cowboy Comics Library was entitled ‘Kit Carson and the Relief of Fort Lonesome’ (No. 26) and it showed his ability to capture the mood and look of a past time and place as well as great liveliness in his panels. Forrest was to draw a number of Kit Carson adventures for the Library in the next few years. The next strip of this new artist to delight British readers appeared on the cover of Comet , in June 1951 entitled ‘Kit Carson’s Wild Ride.’ This was the first time an adventure strip had appeared on the cover of a weekly comic in the U.K. since Film Picture Stories back in the 1930s and, helped by the fact that it was printed in two-tone colour photogravure, it made quite an impact. Holmes was using his new artist to great effect and it was now obvious that a major new player had arrived on the British comic scene. When Leonard Matthews took over the editorship of the recently published Thriller Comics Library , he decided on a new policy of book-length strip stories with the content aimed at the slightly older reader. His own first piece of writing for the Library was ‘The Strange Affair of the Lyons Mail’ (No. 30) and the man he chose to bring his script to life was this interesting new artist, Robert Forrest. This is one of the first truly satisfying issues of the Library thanks to the combination of Matthews’ script and Forrest’s atmospheric and authentically-realised drawings. Forrest was now fast becoming a mainstay of the Thriller Comics Library and he soon found himself working on a number of adaptations of classic adventure stories for boys, including ‘Bardelys the Magnificent’ by Rafael Sabatini (No 35), ‘Paul Clifford’ by Lord Lytton (No. 46), ‘The Black Swan’ again by Sabatini (No. 61) and ‘The Three Musketeers’ by Alexandre Dumas (No. 70). Quite how Forrest managed to draw so many first class book-length strips for the Library in such a short time is anybody’s guess. ‘The Red Rapiers’ (No. 78), based on a story by Morton Pike (D. H. Parry), was followed by its sequel, ‘The Black Dragoons’ (No. 90), while, in between, Forrest drew yet another Sabatini story, ‘The Chronicles of Captain Blood’ (No. 84) and a western , ‘Buffalo Bill and the Battle of Sun Valley’ (No. 100). Forrest drew two more strips based on the stories of Rafael Sabatini, ‘The Sea Hawk’ (No. 108), which appears in this collection, and ‘Tales of the Highway’ (No. 133), the former being particularly successful. In ‘The Sea Hawk’ Forrest brings the world of the Barbary pirates to fierce, vigorous life. Scripted by the talented Barry Ford ROBERT FORREST