Alan Willow
Alan Willow: From being a kid, I always loved comics. In fact I've still got some I did when I was about eight years old! After I left school, I managed to get a job with Sydney Jordan Associates. I was really lucky - I worked up in their studio off Shoe Lane in Fleet Street. I made the tea, fetched Cokes, and did a bit of artwork while watching them drawing. I would practice, and they would help me out and guide me. They had some really good artists - George Stokes, who had a western strip in a newspaper, and Gary Keane, who did a strip called 'How Things Work' or something - information strips and sports stuff. That was my grounding, and when I was good enough to go freelance, I did work for Mick Anglo - who I knew - and illustrated the Green Hornet strip in TV Tornado for a short while, becoming famous for one of the worst bits of artwork that anyone has ever seen! I was quite young, and my drawing was really terrible. I worked for IPC Magazines on a freelance basis, and the picture libraries - I did Air Ace mostly, a lot of covers and sometimes the insides. I was never a very good figure artist, I was better at doing mechanical stuff, machines and aeroplanes and things like that. I also worked for D.C. Thomson as well, on Victor. Then I moved up to Leeds, and got a job in a studio doing licensed characters for t-shirts, chocolate boxes - Easter and Christmas ranges. I went freelance again, and worked for Bassetts the confectioners, for sixteen years, again I did a lot of their Easter and Christmas ranges - Dangermouse, Mr Men, Hanna Barbera characters, and Disney. I designed a lot of packaging for them and that was my main work during that period. I worked for another packaging company, Magna.

I worked for IPC Magazines on a freelance basis, and the picture libraries - I did Air Ace mostly, a lot of covers and sometimes the insides. I was never a very good figure artist, I was better at doing mechanical stuff, machines and aeroplanes and things like that. I also worked for D.C. Thomson as well, on Victor.

The cover of Front-line Combat No.1, published in 1959. Alan Willow comments, 'This was done for L.Miller & Co. and was the the very first job I ever had published. I did the front cover, all the inside illustrative work and wrote all the stories. Even though it only ran for three or four issues I was very proud of it... being around 18 at the time! I still have a printed copy of No. 1. I was paid the princely sum of £50 for each complete issue... crap money, even for those days!'

Alan Willow is best known for the the text illustrations in several early Doctor Who Target novelisations. But a few years before this, he painted most of the covers for TV21 & Joe 90 from late 1969, until the Star Trek strip replaced these on the front page in the summer of 1970.

More recently, Alan Willow has been the brains behind the Mission File pull-out competition sections in the Redan Thunderbirds magazine - coming up with the original idea of a theme, and planning out the concept for other illustrators to finish.

A confirmed comic and SF fan himself, Alan Willow kindly spoke to the Gerry Anderson Complete Comic History recently about his work. As his own introduction states, 'I have always had a love of comics for as long as I can remember... the first comic that had a massive influence on me was the Eagle. I have spent almost all of my working life as an illustrator in comics, packaging design and kid's games. I worked a lot on licensed characters. For the last six years I have worked in schools helping children with special needs, and still doing some freelance artwork as well. I started the Mission pull outs from the very beginning, and did every issue until the reprints started. In a way I was glad it ended as after almost 6 years I was beginning to run out of ideas. Yes, it's amazing coming back to Thunderbirds after all this time...'