EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 9 © 2014 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

67 All images © IPC Media strip artists this country has produced. His career spanned almost sixty years and exhibited a remarkable versatility, an ability to be completely at home in almost any genre or historical period and, most of all, a vivid, idiosyncratic style which made any drawing he did radiate life and fluid movement. Eric Parker’s distinctive Sexton Blake drawings first began to appear in the pages of Union Jack in November 1922 and he soon became the paper’s definitive illustrator. Parker’s distinctive style was immediately recognizable, his covers strikingly depicting the mood of the stories—occasionally comical but usually mysterious and brooding. The faces of his characters, obviously drawn at speed, conveyed with a few deft strokes their owner’s character. The title page illustrations, sometimes spreading across pages one and two, often rivalled the cover for power and atmosphere. Studying them, one is aware of the economy of line used and the thickness of the brush strokes and it is this very shorthand style that gives the work such impact. Eric Robert Parker was born in Stoke Newington, North London, on September 7, 1898. From an early age he was always drawing and, at the age of fifteen, he was awarded a special art scholarship, the first of its kind, and the Boy’s Own Paper carried a news item praising his success in a 1913 issue,