Frank Hampson

Frank Hampson was born to Robert and Elsie Hampson 21 December 1918 in Manchester England.

Hampson started his art career with a job drawing sketches for Meccano's Meccano Magazine. He was 13 at the time.

He left school when 14 to join the Post Office.

He left to enrol full-time with the Victoria College of Arts & Science in the spring of 1938.

when WW2 began Frank Hampson enlisted in the the Royal Army Service Corps. He became a truck driver for the Army and earned the rank of second Lieutenant.

He was married to Dorothy in 1944.

At the end of the war he joined the Southport School of Arts and Crafts.

During this period Hampson began to win a variety of open art competitions including many commercial art contests such as cash prizes for poster design, label design and advertising.

Marcus Morris, a local vicar, employed him casually to do the artwork for a proposed British version of an American-style comicbook, only one enshrining their native Protestant values and with no bloodshed or violence but instead educational stories and stories with a British Imperial theme.

Frank was now even more pressed financially, and was tempted to go freelance in London - which would have broken the link with Marcus Morris. Marcus then employed him full time, and over the next few months Eagle began to take shape.

"Title, story, drawings, and inventions were all mine and .. the paper, in recognisable form, and christened Eagle by my wife, was ready on my council house dining room table".

-Frank Hampson

Marcus Morris took the prototype and sketches of the magazine to Fleet Street. Hulton's publishers picked up the product and the Eagle magazine was born. Hulton's were fairly small scale, and in 1949 there were all sorts of problems for publishers, in particular a shortage of paper. Matters moved fast from there on, and on 14th April 1950, the first issue of Eagle hit the newsagents. Frank never did finish his diploma at Southport.

There is no doubt that Frank was being well paid, but there was a snag which didn't seem that important at the time - the copyright of Eagle and all that was in it was held by Hulton's ... not by Frank, who had invented, written and drawn Dan Dare. This was an issue which would cause great pain later.

Eventually Hampson left Eagle and Dan Dare forever, creating a slew of original characters as well as working on many other projects, especially his comicbook life of Jesus Christ.

Frank died on 8 July 1985.