Rookwood - Just a Falling Branch (Original)
Artist: Tony Weare
Medium: Pen & Ink on Card
Size: 12" x 16" (300mm x 400mm)
Date: 1980
Code: WeareRook1-2
This is the unique original Pen & Ink drawing by Tony Weare.
Rookwood is a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth published in 1834.
It is a historical and gothic romance that describes a dispute over the legitimate claim for the inheritance of Rookwood Place and the Rookwood family name.
This superb adaptation by noted comics historian David Ashford and illustrated by former Matt Marriott newspaper strip artist Tony Weare was published in Look and Learn issues 948 - 963, 22nd March - 23rd August 1980.
Note this page has dark glue/dirt residue over the first panel.
- Artist Biography
Tony Weare (1 January 1912 – 2 December 1994; Wincanton, UK)
Tony Weare was a British comics artist best known for drawing Matt Marriott, a daily Western strip written by Jim Edgar, which ran in The Evening News from 1955 to 1977.
Tony Weare was born at Wincanton, Somerset and studied drawing at the Bournemouth School of Art but became a trooper in a cavalry regiment where he developed a love of horses. As well as Matt Marriott, he also worked at Mickey Mouse Weekly, where he worked on "Billy Brave", "Pride of the Circus", "Savage Splendour", and "Robin Alone". He illustrated "The Colditz Story" for Junior Express and was voted Serious Strip Cartoonist of the Year, 1961. In the 1980s he drew "Rookwood" for Look and Learn magazine and a few sequences in Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, at the invitation of Lloyd, an admirer of his work.
David Lloyd wrote about him:
" Tony was one of just a very few strip artists here and in the US whose creative identities owed nothing to the heritage of stylisation which influenced many other newspaper adventure strip creators—he was primarily an illustrator who just happened to love drawing strips. . . . He also had a superb command of light and shade, which promoted the impression that he was drawing something he could see in front of him, rather than something he'd built up from his imagination."