Frank Bellamy (21 May 1917 – 5 July 1976) was a British comics artist, best known for his work on the Eagle comic, for which he illustrated Heros the Spartan and Fraser of Africa. He reworked its flagship Dan Dare strip.
He also drew Thunderbirds in a dramatic two-page format for the weekly comic TV Century 21 and drew the newspaper strip Garth for the Daily Mirror from 1971 until his death. His work was innovative in its graphic effects and sophisticated use of colour, and in the dynamic manner in which it broke out of the then-traditional grid system.
Biography
Born in Kettering, Northamptonshire, He started work at William Blamire's studio, in Kettering in 1933. Bellamy met his wife Nancy whilst he was stationed near Bishop Auckland during World War II and was married in 1942. In 1944 their son David was born to the couple. After the war, they lived in Kettering until 1949, when they moved to Morden in south London to be closer to publishers, most of whom were based in London. Bellamy worked freelance from home from the time he left Norfolk Studios in 1953. In 1975 the couple moved back to Geddington, near Kettering.
Career
Whilst in the army, Bellamy had a weekly illustration published by the Kettering Evening Telegraph. Later, he worked in advertising (for Gibbs Dentifrice). In 1953, he began his first comic strip, called Monty Carstairs in Mickey Mouse Weekly. Shortly after he moved to Swift where his work included Swiss Family Robinson, King Arthur and Robin Hood.
In 1957, he moved to Eagle and began working in colour on their back page biography strips: The Happy Warrior (the life of Winston Churchill), The Shepherd King (the life of the biblical King David), and The Travels of Marco Polo for which Bellamy only did eight episodes before moving to Dan Dare.
Bellamy took over Dan Dare part way through the Terra Nova storyline, replacing creator Frank Hampson. It was an awkward set-up: the new owners of Eagle thought the strip looked dated, so gave Bellamy the brief of redesigning everything, from the costumes and spacecraft to the page layouts. Bellamy was left to draw the title page unaided (in contrast to Hampson's many-hands approach, where the drawing, inking, lettering and colouring were all separately completed by a team of artists), while two of Hampson's former assistants, Keith Watson and Don Harley, had to do the second page. Bellamy's redesigns were somewhat controversial and, after he left the strip a year later, the next artist was instructed to reintroduce the original designs.
Bellamy then went on to draw two of his most celebrated strips, Fraser of Africa and Heros the Spartan. He also drew Montgomery of Alamein (the life of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery) and did some work for Look and Learn.
Fraser of Africa, one of Bellamy's artistic high-water marks, was not his idea but, as he was obsessed with Africa, he was the perfect choice to draw it. Bellamy used a monochromatic sepia colour palette to reflect the sun and desert locale, with occasional bursts of bright colour. It was a challenging and unusual approach and Fraser of Africa became the Eagles most popular strip. Bellamy insisted on proper research and even had a reader living in East Africa supplying reference material.
Heros the Spartan, a sword and sorcery adventure set in Roman times was another artistic triumph. Drawn as a two-page spread and usually organized around a complicated splash in the centre of the two pages, Heros was a bravura display of skill. The battle scenes displayed a vividness and complex layout rarely seen in comics and it won Bellamy an award (for 'Best Foreign Artist') from the American Academy of Comic Book Arts in 1972.