When the giants of the British adventure strip are discussed, Ron Embleton’s name will always be to the fore. His work for such diverse periodicals as Express Weekly, TV Century 21, Princess, Boy’s World and Look and Learn have earned him the respect of every practitioner in the field and the gratitude of all of us who admire the art of the comic strip.
Ronald Sydney Embleton - known to comic buffs as "Ron", which is how he signed his early work - began drawing for comics at the age of 17 in 1947 and left the field some 30 years later to concentrate on pure illustration. His work spans the crucial two decades of adventure-strip development in this country when comics were moving away from the generally stifled and static pre-war format to a more dynamic, cinema-influenced style.
The pre-war British adventure strip was mostly a sorry, staid affair; invariably a series of rather poorly-drawn pictures with explanatory text underneath. Each frame was not only drawn from the same angle, but editorial policy dictated that all the leading characters were shown in each panel, full-length. The close-up was unheard of, as was the overhead angle shot.
At the end of the Second World War things changed dramatically. Returning ex-servicemen had brought American comics with them and the latter’s influence began to be seen on the British scene. The old-fashioned Victorian illustrator technique was giving way to the fast-moving "cinematic" style. It was at this formative time for the British adventure strip that the young Ron Embleton began work as a commercial artist.
Born in London in 1930, Ronald Sydney Embleton studied art at the South East Essex Technical College under the painter, David Bomberg and, in 1947, began working in a commercial art studio. He started to submit adventure strips to a small London publisher by the name of Scion who were putting out a series of American-style adventure comic books, all with the word "Big" in the title. They were small, 8 page, two-tone comics, priced at threepence and nicely printed in photogravure. In 1948 and 1949 Scion published a dozen or so titles in the series featuring Embleton’s work. The titles of some of these give an indication of the variety of strips that Ron Embleton was writing and drawing for these comics: Big Indian, Big Jungle, Big Pirate, and Big Tong.
Also in 1949, the young comics entrepreneur, Dennis Gifford, used Ron for his two-tone, sixteen-paged, photogravure comic, Ray Regan, published by Modern Fiction. This comic-book owed much to the influence of Denis McLoughlin’s Roy Carson and Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby. Indeed the ‘heavy’ encountered in the Regan strip has many of the characteristics of Raymond’s muscle-bound villain, The Mangler. Despite the obvious quality of both artwork and production Ray Regan lasted for only one issue. Of extra interest to collectors in this comic is a self portrait and potted biography of Ron Embleton on the "Ray Regan Detective Club" page where Ron has the distinction of being made Honorary Member no. 1!
By the time he was called up for military service, the teenage Ron Embleton was already a seasoned strip artist. On his return from National Service in Malaya, Ron set up a studio with James Bleach and Terry Patrick in the latter’s home, working for a variety of small comic publishers. An interesting example of his work at this time was Buffalo Bill and the Phantom which he wrote, drew and lettered in 1951 for T.V. Boardman & Co. This was a 12-page comic printed in orange and green photogravure, part of a series usually drawn by their staff artist, Denis Mcloughlin. At the same time, he was also painting covers for science fiction paperbacks such as John Carstairs - Space Detective, published by Cherry Tree.
There followed a further series of comics for Scion: this time they were larger size, black and white books with coloured covers, a cover price of sixpence and with titles such as Smoking Guns, Five Star Western, Gunflash, Gallant Adventure, Gallant Detective, Gallant Science, Gallant Western and Prairie Western. The Embleton style was now unmistakable in its confident, easy-going, pleasing line and young enthusiasts undoubtably looked out for the familiar ‘Ron’ signature, written in broad italic capitals that they knew was the hallmark of an excitingly drawn adventure strip. It is interesting to note that, from his earliest work right though to the end of his career, he used a brush for all his line work and shading. Right from the start, Ron’s approach to his work was as a painter rather than as a draughtsman. He brought a welcome touch of class to whatever he touched and the Embleton "look" brightened up many an impoverished early British comic such as the publications of Gerald G. Swan.

A true success story of rags to riches, Gerald Swan began as a London market trader selling second-hand comics at a wooden stall and ended up with a small publishing empire. From the early 1940s to the late ‘50s, Swan tried hard to give an American look to his publications and mostly failed dismally. But they were fun and became a fascinating part of the British comic scene. Without a doubt the most professionally-polished adventure strip artist to appear in the Swan publications was Ron Embleton - albeit at the time he must almost certainly have been the youngest.
Ron’s work mostly appeared in the albums (as Swan called his annuals), again not only doing the drawing and lettering but writing the scripts as well. The influence of the US strip on the young Embleton was nowhere clearer than in the detective strips featuring private eye, Chick Hensman, that he created for these albums in the early 1950s. Both drawing and writing owed a great deal to the great Will Eisner’s 'The Spirit' and there is much wit and humour on display, qualities not usually found in British adventure strips at that time. For the Swan comics, Embleton wrote and drew a fascinating series of true-life western strips which he called Lore of the West. These were reprinted time and again in various Swan comics and albums. Swan was known for his continual reprinting of material and the most often repeated of all the Swan strips was Embleton’s Frontiersman!, a one-off tale of Colonial America.
Ron Embleton was fascinated by the history of the American West (when he was a boy, he wanted to be a cowboy) and the period he particularly loved was the early Colonial days of virgin forest, buckskin-clad frontiersmen and savage Indians with Mohican haircuts. When he was taken up by the Amalgamated Press in 1951 he was soon drawing and scripting a picture serial set in his favourite period. While The Forgotten City may have been his first strip for the long-established Comic Cuts, it was The Mohawk Trail, an exciting adventure-strip set during the pioneering days of the Old West and printed in black and red on the back page of Comic Cuts during 1951 and 1952, that firmly established him as one of the Amalgamated Press’ most promising adventure-strip artists. His strips for Comic Cuts,and its stable-mate, Wonder, helped to prop up the comics’ circulations during their declining years. Both were old-fashioned "funnies", papers that would almost certainly have folded in 1951 if it had not been for Ron Embleton’s splendidly drawn adventure strips that sustained them until they were both incorporated into other AP titles in September 1953.
At about the same time as he started drawing for Comic Cuts Embleton also began drawing the occasional Kit Carson western strip for the back page of Comet,a comic that would soon be at the forefront of the Amalgamated Press' "adventure strip revolution". A little later, in 1957, he illustrated the first of three editions of The Wild West Book, published by Birn Brothers. These annual-sized volumes, each with full colour pictorial boards painted by the prolific cover artist James McConnell, all had internal artwork by Embleton illustrating their mix of fact and fiction about the American West. The Birn Brothers volumes were an obvious attempt to emulate the great success of Boardman’s Buffalo Bill Wild West Annuals drawn and painted by Denis McLoughlin, and while the former may not as well known among collectors as the latter, their fine Embleton artwork makes them worthy of a place in any representative collection of the artists work. In 1961 Purnell used material, including many of Ron’s illustrations and strips, drawn from these volumes for their A Bigger Wild West Book.
The 1950s was the decade of the Western - in films, TV and comics - and Ron Embleton was in his element. He was even commissioned to do a series of full-page colour pictures of Indians and frontiersman for the back of Kelloggs cereal packets! These were drawn with verve and power and with great attention to historicaI accuracy and are highly valued by collectors of his work. (It would be interesting to discover how many of these rare pieces of ephemera survive.)
Ron Embleton was always a true freelance, never dependent on, or associated exclusively with, any one publisher. And, being a naturally fast worker, he was able to work on any number of strips at the same time. His output during the 1950s was prolific. In 1953 alone, in addition to his work for the Amalgamated Press, Ron was drawing for DC.Thomson’s Hotspur (The Singing Sword); DCMT’s Lone Star (some superb covers, a western serial strip starring Steve Larrabee, and the excellent true-life feature Lore of the West a continuation of the series he had been doing for the now defunct Swan comics, the drawing of which he now often shared with his younger brother, Gerry); Hamilton’s one-off comic, Jet (the space hero, Captain Atom); Gould-Light’s Spaceman Comics (Bill Merrill of the Scientific lnvestigation Bureau); Comyns’ Star Rocket (The Robot and They Came from Uranus) World’s Western Super Thriller Comics (various western adventures co-drawn with his brother, Gerry) and Odham’s Mickey Mouse Weekly (his first strip to tell the full story of his favourite historical characters, Rogers’ Rangers).
While Embleton was particularly fond of drawing western strips he was equally at home in almost any genre of the adventure strip and there is a loyal following for his science-fiction work, much of which appeared in the ‘one offs’ and short run comics of the 1940s and 50s already mentioned. These comics are now very hard to find, but fortunately some of the Embleton science fiction strips they contained were reprinted in a number of the card covered albums published by G.T during the 1950s and 60s. For example, three Bill Merrill of the Scientific lnvestigation Bureau strips, from the elusive Spaceman Comics, appeared in the album Mysteries of the Unexplored, and a further Merrill strip was reprinted in Outer Space. One of the ‘Jason’ strips from Star Rocket was reprinted in Other Worlds Album. These albums are now themselves difficult to find but any encountered should have their contents scoured for Ron Embleton strips reprinted from even scarcer comics!
A particularly difficult to find Embleton science fiction item is an oblong, twenty-paged, card covered book published by Amex sometime during the late 1940s entitled The Space Patrol. This is a ‘Story Book with Models’, and consists of an eight page text adventure, Calling All Spaceships, with black and white spot illustrations by Ron, and five full-colour card pages with various space-ships and other related models to cut out and slot together. The cut-out nature of this book makes it very scarce to find complete and only a handful are known to exist. A copy complete with all its cut-out pages intact will probably cost around fifty to sixty pounds.
Slightly less scarce but equally interesting is the card-covered science fiction booklet illustrated by Embleton entitled The World of Space, published by P.R. sometime during the 1950s. The cover and four internal pages are in colour while most of the other pages carry black and white spot illustrations. Running along the bottom edge of each page is a continuous strip, The Green Moon, recounting the adventures of Nick Ballard, and his assistants, Rock Murphy and Janice Carr. While not as difficult to find as The Space Patrol, The World of Space is still quite an elusive item and a VG copy will cost around twenty pounds.
In 1955, Embleton was drawing strips for newspapers: Johnny Carey for Reveille, revealing a hitherto neglected talent for drawing attractive young women, and the sporting strip, The Life of Ben Hogan for The Daily Express. His last newspaper strip was a fishing strip he began in 1984 for the Express’ Saturday edition entiled Terry and Son. In fact, the Express’ cartoon editor, Gerry Lip, received the last of these strips on February 19, 1988, just hours after hearing of Ron’s sudden, untimely death.
By the mid-1950s, Ron was also drawing full-length strip versions of John Hunter’s famous drifting cowboy, Lucky Lannigan, for Amalgamated Press’ Cowboy Picture Library - 64 picture packed pages for 10d. Lannigan, along with a whole host of other cowboy heroes, had originally featured in text stories in AP’s Western Library. While none of Embleton’s work had appeared in any of the Lannigan text adventures, the artist did contribute some superb full page and spot illustrations to five issues of Western Library (nos: 79, 84, 89, 98, 104).
The Lannigan strips in Cowboy Picture Library are superbly drawn adventures brimming with detail. Lucky Lannagan’s Mystery Trail, for example, has a sequence of a locomotive plunging down into a river. Studying the frames reveals a strip that has more accurate period detail than most found in book illustrations. His settings: landscapes, rock formations, bar-rooms, camp-fires and stage-coaches, are all imbued with a great sense of realism. As well as the Lannigan strips Ron also drew the occasional Buck Jones and Kit Carson western strip for Cowboy Picture Library, and these too bear his unmistakable stamp of authenticity that makes his work totally believable. In similar vein he drew two memorable full-Iength strips of Victor Canning mystery novels for Amalgamated Press’ Super Detective Library. These were Panther’s Moon, in no. 58, and The Golden Salamander, in no. 72. At around the same time,1954, he began the long-running Robin Hood-type series, Strongbow the Mighty, for Mickey Mouse Weekly. This was a quality strip, still fondly remembered. When, in 1957, Mickey Mouse Weekly split into two separate publications - Zip, and Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse - Strongbow The Mighty, drawn by Ron’s brother, Gerry, continued in Zip.
By now, Embleton was at the peak of his artistic powers as a strip artist. In 1957, he began work on what is probably his finest black and white strip, Don o’ the Drums for Mickey Mouse Weekly. This long-running serial strip told the story of the English/French colonial war in North America and featured, once again, those hardy frontiersmen, Rogers’ Rangers. An ephemeral item from around this period that Embleton collectors should look out for is the Davy Crocket Painting Book. Published by Birn Brothers, this card covered book had thirty-one pictures to colour and was obviously inspired by the Walt Disney film. 1957 was a halcyon year for Embleton for it also saw him blazing forth, for the first time in full colour, on the front page of the new Express Weekly comic with Wulf the Briton.
Of all his adventure strips, Wulf is probably the one for which Ron Embleton is best remembered. In fact, it was not his original creation, for Ron took over the strip from other artists, but he soon made it very much his own. At the time of Ron’s takeover, he was not too keen on the way the strip was being written but it was not long before Ron found himseIf in complete control of the strip, writing the script himself and involving Wulf in real historical situations. Just as in his early days, Ron was writing, drawing and lettering the entire strip but now, for the first time, he was painting it in full colour. Express Weekly was printed in photogravure on good quality paper and was able to do full justice to Ron’s superb colour work. Perhaps best remembered of all his Wulf the Briton output are the full page battle scenes, brimming with accurately drawn warriors, that from time to time graced the cover of Express weekly; these, perhaps, inspired Frank Bellamy who introduced similar battle scenes into his "Heros The Spartan" strips in Eagle during the early 1960s.
In 1960, with the demise of Wulf the Briton, W.E. Johns’ flying ace, Biggles, took over the front page of the now retitled TV Express, drawn and painted by Ron Embleton. Issues of the comic featuring Biggles are now highly sought after by W.E.Johns collectors, and it is perhaps an indication of how under-valued comic art is in the United Kingdom, compared with other European countries, that these Embleton Biggles strips are about to be reprinted in book form on the continent while remaining generally unavailable over here except in old issues of the comic.
Embleton’s work on Biggles lasted only a short time before the character was relegated to an inside page where the artwork was taken over by Mike Western. The editor of TV Express had obviously decided that Second World War adventures were more commercially popular for their front page and, as Ron Embleton was their number one artist, he was given first Battleground and then Colonel Pinto. Both series show, not only his love for action, but his ability to research a subject thoroughly and get the uniforms and hardware absolutely right.
When TV Express folded in 1963, Ron moved to the new weekly, Boy’s World, where again he worked on a full-colour strip, Wrath of the Gods, scripted by Michael Moorcock. Ron found this assignment not to his taste and soon left (the strip being taken over by John Burns). Boy’s World merged with Eagle and, for the latter, Ron drew Johnny Frog, a black and white Napoleonic spy strip, that ran from February to September 1964.
Moving on to TV Century 21, in 1965, Ron began to draw Gerry Anderson’s puppet creations, Stingray and Captain Scarlett in strip form - he actually painted the TV credits for Captain Scarlett, as those watching the current BBC re-run of the series will notice. Despite his self-confessed lack of enthusiasm for these strips, Embleton was extremely good in this field. His Stingray and Captain Scarlet strips exactly compliment the TV material, conveying excitement and a genuine sense of awe and wonder.
By the early 1970s, the full-colour gravure comics were mostly a thing of the past but there were two publications just starting which, although they were not exactly comics, were certainly printed in full colour gravure and used the best artistic talents available. The publications were Once Upon a Time and Look and Learn, and Ron became a major contributor to both. He was very much at home with historical and fairy tale fantasy and he did some beautiful colour work for Once Upon a Time, a magazine for very young readers. Some of his illustrations from this magazine were re-used in compilations of stories such as Beauty and the Beast and Other Stories, published by Galley in 1985. It was during this period of his career that Ron Embleton prequently provided illustrations for large format editions of children’s classics including Wind In the Willows (Dean 1985) and Treasure Island (Collins 1972). The latter, in the Collins Adventure Books in Colour series, is particularly well illustrated with almost three dozen full colour illustrations by Embleton, though the artist does not in fact get a credit for his work!
It was, however, for Look and Learn, the educational magazine for older children, that Ron did some of his very best work, including story illustrations and full-colour covers. Perhaps his most important work for this paper was the colour series he wrote and illustrated in 1970: Rogers’ Rangers. Here he was back in his element, retelling a story from the early history of colonial America, a story he had told before in black and white in Mickey Mouse Weekly, over a decade earlier. Ron revels in the visualisation of the gruelling, dangerous expedition of the green-buckskinned frontiersmen under the leadership of Major Rogers as they endure all the rigours and privations of the wilderness on the trail of blood-crazed Mohawk Indians. Never before or since has the epic grandeur of the mountains and forests of North America been so graphically and imaginatively conveyed as in Ron Embleton’s resplendent pictures for this series.
Collins evidentally recognized Embleton’s pre-eminence in the illustration of the early Western frontier and chose him to illustrate Jeff Jeffries’ Davy Crockett, Frontiersman for their Seagull Library in 1956. Two years later, Ron illustrated his one and only book for T. V. Boardman, The First Book of Heroes. The book was in exactly the same format as Boardman’s famous Buffalo Bill Wild West Annuals, ‘though sporting a pictorial dustwrapper rather than laminated pictorial boards. The First Book of Heroes contains colour paintings and black and white drawings illustrating "true tales of the heroism of Men Past and Present who have ventured into the unknown", from Hannibal to the spacemen of the future. This book is a must for the Embleton collector but is difficult to find in its wrapper.
In the early 1960s, Ron’s work was to be found in the ever-expanding girls’ comic market. In August 1963, he began a fine, full-colour strip version of Captain Marryatt’s Children of the New Forest for Princess. In the same year he drew for two girls’ annuals, both dated, of course, for the following year. In the June Book for 1964, he drew a six page, half-tone strip entitled, My Girl, Mary and, for the Girl’s Crystal Annual for 1964, he produced an eight page strip set in India, Zizi and the Dacoits, which featured savage warriors and a pet black leopard (reminding us how good Ron was at depicting anilmals).
During the late 1950s and the early ‘60s, Embleton illustrated a number of annual-type books. The first of these was King Arthur and His Knights, published by Hampster Books around 1956 as number 29 in their Early Reader Series. At about the same time Embleton painted an Arthurian strip, entitled The Story of the Boy King Arthur, for the nursery comic, Playhour. This finely painted, three part strip ran across the colour centre pages of the comic in August 1956 and was one of his earliest works to be signed in full: ‘R.S.Embleton’. For Adprint, a publisher that specialized in TV spin-off books, he illustrated The Adventures of Robin Hood Annual numbers 3 (1958), 4 (1959) and 5 (1960), based on the popular television series starring Richard Greene. Further television related books Embleton illustrated for Adprint were: The Adventures of Sir Lancelot No.2 (1958), Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans (1959) and the colour cover for Cheyene Adventures (1960). Internal illustrations for the latter were provided by Donald Walduck. He also illustrated a similar TV related volume called R.C.M.P. Tales of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for Purnell in 1961. Each book contains strips by Ron (apart from Sir Lancelot where the strips are drawn by Cecil Doughty and Robin Hood 3 where they are the work of Alan Philpott) as well as illustrations to the text, both in black and white and full colour. The Hawkeye volume in particular - it is, of course, set in Ron’s favourite place and time, Colonial America - contains some of his best work. These TV related volumes are particularly sought after by aficionados of Ron’s work. Another Purnell book worth looking out for is the Robin Hood Painting Book, published by the firm in 1961. This is one of a series of painting books published over the years related to the TV series, but this particular issue is the only one illustrated by Embleton.
Two large-format, all-colour books on the American West he wrote and illustrated during the 1960s and early ‘70s, and which are highly regarded amongst enthusiasts, are Pioneers and Heroes of the Wild West (Purnell, 1969) and Adventurers of the Wild West (World Distributors, 1971). Another book in the same format of interest to collectors is The Valiant Book of Pirates, published by Fleetway in 1967, which he co-illustrated with his brother, Gerry.
By the end of the ’60s, Ron Embleton was becoming an illustrator rather then a strip artist. In 1960, he had been elected a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the National Society of Painters and Sculptors, and his work was being exhibited, not only in this country, but also in the USA, Canada, Australia and many parts of Europe. By the 1970s, Ron had moved completely away from juvenile-orientated work to concentrate on historical illustrations, projects such as a series of paintings sold as prints for framing with titles like Children’s Street Games, published by Solomon and Whitehead, and Old London Street Traders, published by Prints for Pleasure. He also painted a series of Characters from Dickens for This England magazine.
In 1972, Ron began a long association with Newcastle publisher, Frank Graham. Ron had met Graham in the late 1960s while on holiday with his family in Tangier. When Frank Graham was later sent some examples of his work, he became an immediate Embleton fan: "I was astounded", Graham has written, "They were absolutely unbelievable."
All in all, Ron provided around 140 paintings of the North-East to illustrate Graham’s publications. Among this work are included 80 pictures of life on Hadrian’s Wall; 15 paintings of the Farne Islands and their bird life as well as pictures of local places and characters. He produced eighty coloured plates and over one hundred black and white drawings for twelve booklets on Roman life which have sold more than 50,000 copies and one particular painting of life at Housestead Fort, which was produced as a postcard, has sold more than one million copies. Indeed, total sales of his series of postcards of Roman life have exceeded six million. In 1984, Frank Graham produced a hardback volume entitled Hadrian’s Wall in the Days of the Romans which is packed with Ron’s paintings and drawings, some of which had appeared in the earlier booklets. (It is interesting to note that some of the small, black and white illustrations are by Ron’s daughter, Gill.) It is acknowledged that Ron Embleton’s illustrations are among the most authentic reconstructions of Roman life ever produced.
Embleton had not deserted strip work altogether for, in 1973, he began work on a picture strip, which was to achieve an enormous following: Wicked Wanda. This was a completely new departure for him: a sex and satire strip, scripted by Frederick Mullally for the "adult" magazine, Penthouse. Another of his full-colour strips, it was faithfully and vividly reproduced on high gloss paper. Enormously successful, Penthouse followed it up with a similar strip, Sweet Chastity, scripted by the editor, Bob Guccione. Ron was working on this strip at the time of his death in 1988.
Ron Embleton graduated from a comic artist to become a much-respected illustrator of historical, social and military life; from the humble "Ron" to "Ronald S. Embleton". It is as "Ron", however, that he will be mostly fondly remembered - as the artist of Wulf the Briton and Rogers’ Rangers and countless other marvellous strips and story illustrations in which he took young readers into an exciting world which, although painstakingly researched, remained the product of one man’s highly personal and imaginative vision.

Reprinted from Book and Magazine Collector no. 216 by permission of the publisher and the authors, David Ashford and Norman Wright. Back issues of Book and Magazine Collector can be obtained from: Book & Magazine Collector, 45 St. Mary’s Rd, Ealing, London W5 5RQ. Issues cost : UK: £3.50, Europe £3.95. Special offer on back issues to USA, Canada and Australia: 3 issues by surface mail for £11.00. By Airmail: USA/Canada: 3 issues for £13.50, Australia: 3 issues for £13.90. Payment in Sterling payable: Diamond Publishing Group Ltd.