Thunderbirds… To the Rescue!

(THUNDERBIRDS COMIC ALBUM VOLUME 1)

Thunderbirds… To the Rescue!

By Frank Bellamy, with Steve Kite & Graham Bleathman, edited and compiled by Alan Fennel (Ravette Books/Egmont)
ISBN: 1-85304-406-7

Growing up in 1960’s England was the best of all possible worlds for a comic lover. As well as US imports you were treated to some frankly incredible weekly publications, and market bookstalls sold second-hand comics for at least a third of their cover price. We also had some of the greatest artists in the world working on some of the best licensed properties around. A perfect example is the TV – and especially Gerry Anderson properties – anthology comic TV Century 21.

This slim volume from the 1990s reprints three of the best adventures of the Band of Brothers from Tracy Island, illustrated by the incredible Frank Bellamy, and although the reproduction is rather poor (nothing available to modern printers seems able to fully reproduce the magical and luxuriant quality of photogravure printing, alas) ‘The Earthquake Maker’, ‘The Revolution’ and ‘The Big Freeze’ are Thunderbirds adventures in the classic manner.

Despite the colour inadequacies, the astounding design skill and sheer bravura of Bellamy’s rendering makes these tales of unnatural disasters, tensely written by Alan Fennell, as absorbing now as they were then. A collection was released in 2002, but we’re long overdue for a major treatment by a major publisher. Let’s hope it’s soon…

© 1991 ITC Entertainment Group Ltd. Licensed by Copyright Promotions Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

2 Replies to “Thunderbirds… To the Rescue!”

  1. Win, I totally agree! Wouldn’t be great if we could see ALL the Thunderbird strips by FB in one “Absolute Thunderbirds”!
    I’m dribbling!

  2. Sadly, one of the bars to a thick collection is that the early Thunderbirds strips ran across the double page spread. In a large book, the centre portion of the art, plus balloons, disappears into the spine. If that could be solved satisfactorily — perhaps an extra-wide book, with two TV21 pages to a single page — then I’d be all for it.

    I do have the full set of TV21, though, so personally, I’d love to see a collection of the complete Heros the Spartan. They missed a trick by not collecting that when the film 300 came out. Miller’s original graphic novel was quite clearly influenced by Bellamy.

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