I Wish I'd published this

It's perhaps less and less likely to stumble on some great, undiscovered comics artist of the past than it was a few years ago - Dan Nadel has unearthed most of them :-). But Jack Daniel was new to me. I spent some of last weekend wandering around a massive boot sale with my girlfriend and her parents who were visiting from Germany and were keen to fill their car for the trip home with loads of old British tat. Well I suppose at least to them it was different tat. Surprisingly I actually found something I wanted to buy - 4 volumes of Hawk Books reprints of excerpts of what they call 'Eagle Classics' which I imagine they released off the back of their success with Dan Dare books in the late 80's. For the most part they are what you expect from Eagle, highly detailed art in the style of Bellamy or Lawrence or humour work, but one of the books 'Riders of the Range' includes artist Jack Daniel's (yeah I know - believe me it doesn't help when looking for info via Google) take on the cowboy strip, and it's something of a revelation. 

Unfortunately the reproduction in the book is pretty poor, a lot of the fine line is gone, and the colour even if it was a singular interpretation (and it looks very much like it was) is badly skew-whiff, so bad in fact that some of the best pages aren't even worth scanning. What comes through however is how 'modern' the line is for someone working in one of the more traditional British comics. I think you can see in the panels scanned here the almost impressionistic style of the soldiers on the fort ramparts, the pared down, angular cut of the faces, the use of heavy cropping in the panel where the indians are leaving. Look at it enough and you would think that Daniel spent some time looking at Harvey Kurtzman or early Bernie Krigstein. I'm not sure a quality reprinting of Daniel's work would find a market - I personally doubt it - but he does seem, even from this small glimpse, an artist very much worth reclaiming as a UK great. I'm sure Steve Holland knows much more about him and what else he worked on, as this book only mentions 3 'Riders' stories and a 'Kit Conquest' newspaper strip. Look for more 'I wish I published' as I try to make sure I update this blog regularly. If you have one send me your info and perhaps I'll feature it.