CREATOR CHAT

Sydney Jordan

Titan Books chat to Sydney Jordan, the legendary creator of Jeff Hawke, where he discusses the origin of the character and his legacy as one of the most important figures in science fiction literature!

Jeff Hawke and his brother-in-arms, Mac Maclean represent all that was thought of as the Churchill Spirit which sustained Britain in her darkest hour.  They are measured, courageous and masters of the art of flying but with the wry self-deprecation of the true gentleman (!)  They are the product of an age of (some may say suspect) chivalry, which existed before and for a while after the war.  A time when men stopped and doffed their hats if a funeral cortege passed by and before "May I have the pleasure of this dance?" became "Can I borrow your frame for the next struggle?"

There are some science fiction stories that are so stunning in concept that you wish you had not yet read them! Ray Bradbury's 'A Sound of Thunder' is one such and when I first read it back in 1950, the blend of fantasy and science and the literally fabulous sting in the tail left me with an overwhelming desire to work in this field. I confess that I was not in for the long haul when it came to science fiction and it was the short story, both S.F and supernatural by masters of the genre that inspired my early efforts. Bradbury's 'The Martian Chronicles', a series of shorts linked in a novella length saga, was an acceptable format for this lazy reader and full of the human condition under the alien microscope. Willie Patterson was a fan and I suspect that our overall poetic vision for the strip stemmed in great part from this man's groundbreaking take on the nature of 'otherness'!

Some aliens in Jeff Hawke were given their names using the time-honoured trick of putting a K in the mix - Kolvorok and Klosk have two for good measure.  To English speakers, 'K' in a name spells 'foreign' and 'sinister'. That's where Boris got his Karloff. . . . Chalcedon on the other hand is named after a variety of quartz, Chalcedony, while His Excellency has no 'Christian' name but is known to his own people as The High Zool of Draco, the Zool bit coming from the dictionary shorthand for zoological! And there you were thinking we got their names from the galactic phone book!

Hawke's appearance was based primarily on Alex Raymond's 'Flash Gordon' character, a kind of fit-all blueprint for clean-cut hero types. I soon realised that any comparisons made would show up all the inadequacies of my earlier efforts!  Then gradually my memories of meeting people like Leonard Cheshire and fighter pilots from both the war and the subsequent Cold War era began to shape a much more relevant image of an RAF officer. Group Captain Cheshire, a Victoria Cross holder, came to Miles Tech School in 1946 to describe his experience as the British observer on the Nagasaki A-bomb attack.  He seemed somehow distanced from the appalling carnage this new weapon could deliver but this was the soldier in him and born of the all-out war that had just been fought.  His underlying moral and spiritual integrity surfaced soon afterward and the Cheshire Homes for RAF veterans was established. This kind of humanity, buried under the demands of war, is the wellspring of whatever divinity we humans possess.  Coupled with the humour and professionalism of my post-war flying friends, 'cool' before that word was later applied to our present day demimonde.  These encounters helped me to create a plausible duo in Jeff and Mac.

Willie Patterson's contribution to the strip was immeasurable.  He lifted the series clear of the straightforward nuts and bolts aspect of Science Fiction.  His stories not only captured much of the then optimistic view of things to come but he pre-empted the Von Daniken school of 'alien visitations' thought by many years and in such intriguing ways: The lamp/communicator in 'The Wondrous Lamp' (two extra-terrestrial contacts for the price of one!); The Shiva-jewels in 'The Immortal Toys', poignant remnant of a visitation that brought fire to man in a hollow tube.; the gift of a near totally artificial body from alien surgeons to Cordway, victim of a terrible crash at Le Mans in 'The Helping Hand' etc, etc.  But his panoply of aliens, Chalcedon, Kolvorok, His Excellency and all the others must remain as his Magnum Opus. Witty, anarchic, bumbling or magisterial, they strutted across our little two by seven inch stage into the light of what the Italian fans refer to as the Golden Age of Hawke....

While 'The Immortal Toys' remains my favourite story because of its wonderful twist on legend, super-science and the loss of a child, I think 'Counsel For The Defense' and my own story 'Sitting Tenants' mark two moments when the strip reached a point of true uniqueness. The grafting of improbable events to everyday life was something we succeeded in. I think, and although some tales demanded a greater suspension of disbelief than others, overall the plausibility remained.

'Jeff Hawke' was written and drawn as a daily strip and was often lost in a sea of print in some corner of the sports pages, so to read it in book form certainly displays it in a different light!  Of course, its layout and pacing separate it from the 'graphic novel' form in which latter day comic work is displayed and direct comparisons would be inappropriate.  It loses out in colour too but in one respect, a newspaper strip has a special advantage over its comic brethren.  The readership must buy the paper on a regular basis in order to follow the story and so it exactly fulfils the maxim attributed to the nineteenth century dramatist, Charles Reade: 'Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait'!  I hope that Titan's customers can, through the artwork and the scripts, catch the glimpse of a world, which in one way is already history, but in another, an augury of things to come!

We live in an age where, to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, 'technology is indistinguishable from magic' and there were times in Hawke's saga when the magic to come was predicted with some accuracy.  When the later scenarios shifted to the Moon and Mars, the hardware on display followed the same extrapolation from the then current thinking that I had used for earlier predictions and it may be that some of the younger readers will live to see a man on Mars.  Not to mention (gasp!) a first encounter with a REAL extra terrestrial!!