In Doyle 's collection
Description
Opening episode for the JEFF HAWKE story, 'The Dear, Dead Days' (1979).
Artist Sydney Jordan recollects . . .
"Once in the dear dead days beyond recall . . . " is from 'Just a Song at Twilight' as most of you will know. Having lived the first four years of my life in a house lit by gas mantles and next door to my widowed grandmother, whose style of dress and furnishing was resolutely Victorian, I had and still have a built-in fascination with what L. Ron Hubbard called "the beautiful sadness", the unashamed sentiment surrounding life, death and the human condition in Victorian times. Whilst hoping to steer clear of mawkish romanticism, I was free to indulge this passion for the poignant and lyrical. That it involved a twenty-first century android woman flying a Sopwith Camel just goes to show how anything can happen in Hawke's Cosmos!
Artist Sydney Jordan recollects . . .
"Once in the dear dead days beyond recall . . . " is from 'Just a Song at Twilight' as most of you will know. Having lived the first four years of my life in a house lit by gas mantles and next door to my widowed grandmother, whose style of dress and furnishing was resolutely Victorian, I had and still have a built-in fascination with what L. Ron Hubbard called "the beautiful sadness", the unashamed sentiment surrounding life, death and the human condition in Victorian times. Whilst hoping to steer clear of mawkish romanticism, I was free to indulge this passion for the poignant and lyrical. That it involved a twenty-first century android woman flying a Sopwith Camel just goes to show how anything can happen in Hawke's Cosmos!
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About Sydney Jordan
Sydney Jordan (born Dundee, Scotland, 1928) is a comics artist best known for his daily science fiction strip Jeff Hawke, which ran in the Daily Express from 1955 to 1974.
He studied aeronautical engineering at Miles Aircraft's experimental college in Reading, Berkshire, but returned to Dundee and worked as an assistant to comics artist Bill McCail, and learned by studying the work of Alex Raymond, Milton Caniff and Stan Drake. In 1951 he assisted Len Fullerton on his comic strip Dora, Toni and Liz, before creating Jeff Hawke for the Daily Express in 1954. Jordan's friend Willie Patterson came aboard as writer in 1956, and Jordan wrote the later strips himself. The series has been reprinted all over Europe. After Jeff Hawke finished, Jordan created another science fiction strip, Lance McLane, which ran in the Scottish newspaper the Daily Record from 1976 to 1988.
In the mid seventies Jordan produced the one shot "Hall Star" for the Dutch comic strip weekly Eppo, which he did not complete until the mid eighties. It was published in 1987 and 1988 as Stranded on Thyton
