Eric Robert Parker (1898 - 1974; UK)
Eric Parker is probably best known as the Sexton Blake artist, being responsible for hundreds of full-colour covers for the Sexton Blake Library as well as countless covers and interior black and white illustrations for Union Jack and Detective Weekly.

He was a consummate draughtsman, at home illustrating any period of history, and the few strip stories he drew for Thriller Comics Library are amongst the best in the entire series. With the exception of The Children of New Forest (no. 38), which was mainly a reprint of his 1945 Knockout strip with some new material added, and The Secret of Monte Cristo (no. 14), which originated as a superb Parker Sexton Blake strip in Knockout but which for the Thriller Comics Library version was so extensively re-drawn by Reg Bunn that it could scarcely be classified as a Parker strip at all, Parker's contributions were all especially drawn for the Library.

His artistic ability was discovered early on and the young Eric had an article about his talent and the scholarship it had won for him, together with his photograph, in the Boy's Own Paper in 1913. From the outset of his career in illustration, he was prolific and his work can be seen in a wide variety of publications throughout the 1920s and '30s. His first strip work was for Knockout, starting with whimsical fantasy strips such as The Queer Adventures of Patsy and Tim, before going onto a Western strip, The Adventures of Bear Cub. This was followed by a long series of excellent adaptations of adventure classics including Gulliver's Travels (1942-3), Kidnapped (1945-6), "The Black Arrow (1948) and The Three Musketeers (1946).

The work of Parker can be seen in many publications other than those of the Amalgamated Press, notably the evocative historical illustrations, painted in two-tone colour, for the Daily Mail Annual for Boys and Girls. Latterly he worked for the educational magazine, Look and Learn, writing and illustrating such superb historical series as The Scrapbook of the British Army and The Scrapbook of the British Navy, and also producing "visualisation" - sketched-out roughs detailing composition, etc - for other artists to complete. At the time of his death he left the full-colour artwork for an uncompleted series he had created called A Thousand Years of Spying. An unfinished Napoleonic strip of excellent quality was also never published.