Where Eagles Dare

This week my mum has truly embraced semi retirement and begun pulling out boxes upon boxes of what she refers to as "Uncle Reg's Clart" alongside various things given to us by my (living) grandparents when they downsized last year. What this amounts to is that the living room is now chock full of both Lego and a lot of musty boxes which, in today's case, have disgorged about twelve dozen copies of The Eagle from the early fifties.

As it turns out, these Eagles include almost all of the numbers which serialised Biggles in the Blue, about a third of in the Gobi and the issue with the story which turned out to be plagiarised from the mammoth bit of Charter Pilot. All in all I feel very pleased about this, especially because I remembered there had been some Biggles in the Eagle moments before I glanced down and saw the front page header reading NEW BIGGLES STORY BEGINNING THIS ISSUE. Sometimes serendipity strikes.

Anyway Biggles in the Blue is already delivering in spades. What is it delivering? Hard to say. But von Stalhein seems very disappointed that Biggles won't drink wine with him.



Some of the illustrations in The Eagle are closer to how I imagine & Co. in my head but I can't say I'm convinced by this EvS.

Biggles in the Blue

Having ploughed through (I believe) sixteen issues of The Eagle alongside the *cough* very legitimate *cough* ebook for missing bits, I have officially finished Biggles in the Blue!

( Review )

What I'm really here to do, however, is to share some of the illustrations from both in the Blue and in the Gobi, which was serialised directedly after Blue concluded. Both were illustrated by Edwin Phillips, who varied in his interpretation of the characters but never wavered in making them just slightly more twinky than Stead, which I appreciate as a twinky Biggles fan.

( Illustrations )

The last image I'll put here isn't Biggles at all. It is instead an advertisement for Colman's Mustard, because as it turns out in the fifties the advertisers liked to put a bit of thought into what type of print their ad would appear in and so suit it to the medium. In the case of The Eagle, this resulted in the ongoing adventures of Jimmy Walls (one strip has him rescuing a fawn from a literal towering inferno) where every strip ends with him eating a Walls Ice Cream, and also The Three Mustardeers and their arch nemesis the Slipper (because he always slips away, you see). The advert which had me actually reading these alongside in the Blue was one in which the Slipper tricks them into following him into a series of catacombs full of skeletons and then abandoning them in the dark. Then it turns out one of the children (the Mustardeers are at most thirteen or fourteen years old) has thoughtfully brought some chalk and a pocket torch, so they manage to escape the catacombs quite easily. And then they have sandwiches with Colman's Mustard, although they don't say what else they contain so for all I know the sandwiches are just bread and an inch of mustard.

( The Three Mustardeers )

I must know the entire saga of The Three Mustardeers. Is there a D'Artagnan of Mustard? D'Artadijon? It's almost too much to consider.