EXTRACTS: Illustrators Issue 5 © 2013 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

69 www.psartbooks.com For more information visit our website at PS Artbooks Limited. All rights reserved. GOLDEN AGE CLASSIC TITLES Just when you thought it was safe. . . here comes that doyen of depravity PS Artbooks once again with a new sideline namely . . . Lots more tales guaranteed to turn your brain into total mush. Hey, maybe Fred Wertham was right, certainly by looking at the line-ups in these four frightful volumes. Read ‘em and weep, culture-lovers and rest assured there’s more where these came from. Brrr . . . did someone open that door? I was sure I closed - Aaarrrggghhhh! ROY THOMAS PRESENTS and PRE-CODE CLASSICS PRE CODE CLASSICS Their first strips for the comic involved a neat symbiosis, of which its youthful audience would have been entirely unaware for not only were the twins drawing the exploits of Bill and Ben and Andy Pandy , but they had also been responsible for devising and designing the TV iterations of these characters on which the strips were based. BBC TV had launched their Watch With Mother series that very same year, and the rigours of working for modest fees and tight deadlines had provided the girls with a good grounding in the discipline and commitment required for working as commercial artists. In addition, the demands of having to conceptualise and design in the round helped inform the work that they were to create throughout their career. A talent that they had evidently inherited from their mother Doris, whose set design had gained her much acclaim. Their earliest published work revealed their flair for the wildlife that Janet specialised in as well as the well-researched costume work, which was Anne’s forte. Costume was a subject that both the girls had studied whilst at St Martin’s, and again reflected their mother Doris’ influence. Books such as Enid Blyton’s ‘Tales of Ancient Greece’ and Ida Foulis’ ‘This Land of Kings’ allowed them to indulge both these passions, but it was Dodie Smith’s ‘101 Dalmatians’ published in 1956 that brought their work to the attention of a much wider audience. Their work beyond reflected a wide variety of influences. Closest to home, both geographically and contemporaneously, the influence of Radio Times doyen, Eric Fraser and Pauline Baynes (destined for fame as the illustrator of both C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books and J. R. Tolkein’s ‘The Hobbit’, looms large. Further afield, European fairy tale illustrators such as