Hugh McNeill (1910 - 1979; Manchester, UK)
Hugh McNeill was born in Manchester and apprenticed at an Art studio, the Kayebon Press, attending evening classes at the Manchester School of Art. Hugh was best known as a brilliant "funnies" artist for Knockout but his "straight" strips are a delight and his Dick Turpin work is amongst his best. McNeill was chosen by Leonard Matthews to start off the long series of Dick Turpin strips, which were to appear on the back page of the original large-page format Sun. Called "Highway Days", the strip introduced a new companion for Turpin - a girl comrade, Moll Moonlight (a character created by Leonard Matthews). These strips were originally light-hearted affairs but soon after the format of the comic changed, so too did the Turpin stories. The readers were suddenly plunged into the Gothic horror genre of the "penny bloods" and Turpin and Moll Moonlight found themselves in a series of adventures set in haunted manor houses where weird happenings were very much the order of the day and the chief villain was the splendidly evil master criminal "Creepy" Crawley.

McNeill based his Dick Turpin on the actor Richard Greene (whom he had portrayed earlier in his strip version of the film The Fighting O'Flynn for Sun), and the 'gothic' Turpin adventures had an atmosphere akin to that in the 1953 Richard Greene film, "The Black Castle". McNeill was given examples of Derek Eyles work to help him in drawing horses and the occasional frame of a horseman shows clearly how big a debt he owed to Eyles.