Frank Hampson is arguably a name that for many will not truly come to mind when people talk of great British artists. It is to his most enduring creations that many though will respond with nostalgia, the passion of a memory, and the dream of inspiration that beset their youth; the artist will often fade as time moves on, but the creation, the myth, the monster will endure and take on life long after the artist leaves the pencils and the papers to others to draw upon.

If Frank Hampson’s name is only remembered to a few, if the Southport artist’s reputation is kept in mind by those whose lives were touched from the energetic creativity then perhaps all is not lost, but the name of Dan Dare, of the Mekon, of arguably the most important comic book of the 1950s and into the 1960s and briefly in its return across 12 years in the 80s and 90s, The Eagle, then so the artist must always live on in some form.

There is not the stigma surrounding graphic novels that there was when many of us first ventured into the staple bound adventures of many a drawn by hand hero, in today’s world Frank Hampson would be as lauded as any who converse alone in the Universe of comics and the lines of shade and exploration. Yet somehow you cannot help but feel there has been a neglect of one of Britain’s foremost artists, overshadowed maybe by a stuffy, almost purveying Victorian attitude that looked down upon such unique creativity, of the mass appeal that turned, at the time, many a young lad into reading, understanding art, and the lifting of morals, when before the destruction dished out by the generals and politicians of World War Two had been the ultimate form of expression.

In the artist’s home town of Southport, an exhibition of Frank Hampson’s work is on show in one of the halls of the Atkinson building, it is presentation of his creative mind, not only of Dan Dare, of Professor Peabody, Digby and the evil of The Mekon, but also other notable works, his drawing for the famous lives series of Ladybird books, his other comic strip endeavours, but also a rare, if brief, insight into the life of a man, who along with the founder of The Eagle comic book, Marcus Morris, revolutionised the way that young adults, teenager boys saw literature, an enjoyment, an inspiration to would be illustrators in the end of boys and girls.

Like many an exhibition, the surface of the story is barely scratched, the privacy of the man locked by the decades since his passing in 1985 but in the details available, in the comic book pages at the disposal of the curated exhibition, a wealth of wonder, and of pride can be gleaned, the heartbreak of losing the copyright to an endearing hero, of perhaps the shameful way he was treated after the publishers of The Eagle were bought out, but the lasting legacy of the hero and his arch villain that has lived on, sadly overshadowing the artist’s own human legacy.

You don’t have to be interested in the history of comic books, and this is no warts and all showcase in which many in the modern age seem to crave, but it is an insight into the mind of an artist, the page offered out in broad strokes, minute detail, in colour, Dan Dare lives on regardless, but it is to the genius, the humility of Frank Hampson that we should applaud.

Ian D. Hall