Jeff Hawke was the brainchild of Scottish writer and former RAF pilot Sydney Jordan (have you noticed how many of comicdom’s great imagineers originally hail from north of the border – John Wagner, Pat Mills, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar?) and illustrator, fellow Dundonian Willie Patterson. They created Hawke as a kind of debonair galactic secret agent with an apartment in Kensington with a regular team headed by Laura and Mac, and a hotline to Whitehall. He acts as a galactic ambassador/adventurer, preferring to negotiate with aliens rather than enter into battle with lasers blazing. A thoroughly decent British hero. He’s helped by the technical expertise of Patterson’s skilfully rendered illustrations. His aircraft designs look realistic but sufficiently futuristic to be visionary concepts of Tomorrow’s World rather than overtly fantastical. Equally, his tales feel grounded in realism and are often surprisingly ambiguous in their morality, where interpreting the intentions of each alien race becomes more a matter of what perspective you take. In the first story, Overlord, Hawke and his team encounter the meglomaniacal amphibian Chalcedon and a race of beetles who only communicate through telepathy. But who’s controlling who? Wondrous Lamp is a delightful re-imagining of the Aladdin story, with a touch of Von Danekin, long before he penned anything about the Chariots of the Gods, as an alien artefact passes from the 2nd century through generations to modern-day London. It turns out to be a communications device for the start of an unusual alien invasion by the dreaded Klahrid. The final story, Counsel For The Defence, brings back the scheming Chalcedon as Hawke is called on to defend him as a galactic trial before being caught up in his daring escape attempt. Whilst Titan has been making concerted efforts to collect adventures of the long-forgotten artform of newspaper strips (itsearlier volumes of James Bond and Modesty Blaise are testament to that), Jeff Hawke remains an interplanetary jewel even though his last stories appeared in 1975. After nearly 50 years, it feels both old-fashioned but at the same time, sophisticated, with his future running prophetically close to our present at times. Even if he never gets revived for the 21st century, Jeff Hawke and indeed Sydney Jordan, deserve to be remembered as true pioneers of the final frontier.
