Eagles Over the Western Front

This is a special treat for me.

A brilliant combination of two of my passions, comics and First World War aviation.

Originally published in Look & Learn in the early 70’s, Eagles Over the Western Front, written by Mike Butterworth and illustrated by Bill Lacey, is by far my favourite comic about WW1 flyers (not that there are that many to compare, Enemy Ace by DC and Aces High from EC are the only others that leap to mind.).

Being aimed at a young audience it’s inevitable that Eagles will be compared to the WW1 exploits of Biggles by W.E. Johns and I think that Butterworth did use the same tone as Johns when writing the strip. Both narratives flow from straight adventure stories to shocking tragedy in very short order. But I think it’s fair to say that the general flavour of this strip is action and adventure rather than brooding and tortured.

We are treated to Butterworth’s excellent use of diverse characters, from the truly heroic to the lowdown and cowardly. He takes his time building these figures and often, we see the boys grow into far different characters by the end of their inclusion in the story, but best of all, the character development actually makes sense. There are no sudden changes of heart in these pages. Each character grows as his attachment to his fellow flyers deepens, these boys soon learn that the only way to stay alive is to watch each others back, and to trust that their wingmen are watching out for them.

Lacey’s art for the strip is beautiful in places. Unfortunately, most of the instalments were a mere two pages, so don’t expect any splash pages. Each page has plenty of panels with a lot of story per page. But even with this restricted format, Lacey imbues a grand sense of scale to the air battles, even with the small panel size. I have to admit that I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to the realistic portrayal of the fighting aircraft of the Great War, but Lacey’s research and knowledge is spot-on (as was Butterworth’s knowledge in terms of what each aircraft was capable of.) Lacey did serve with the RAF and very much enjoyed drawing ‘planes, apparently he preferred WW2 era, but you wouldn’t guess it, his Sopwith’s, DH’s and Fokker’s look exactly as they should. My only quibble with Lacey is that despite his ability to draw distinctive and accurate hardware, his faces do sometimes look alike, on occasion I was wondering who it was that I was looking at. It’s certainly not a shortcoming for every character in every panel, but there were a couple of instances when I found myself pulled out of the narrative because of it.

The complete Eagles has recently been reprinted in three volumes by Bear Alley Books, with fantastic wrap-around covers by Wilf Hardy, a regular contributor to Look & Learn and himself regarded as a fine illustrator of aircraft. The reprint quality is excellent, with a large portion of the pages reprinted from the original art boards, the introduction says that the eagle eyed reader will see which pages are sourced from the originals and which are sourced from the comics, but even forearmed with this knowledge, there were no glaring drops in quality that I noticed. The price is reasonable at £10 for each of the three 80 page volumes, considering that they would have had a relatively low print run, but I was a little disappointed to find that they are saddle stitched rather than perfect bound, but it’s not a deal breaker.

So yes, there are a couple of very minor negative points in regard to Eagles, but in all honesty it’s just me being precious and pernickety because I love this strip so very much that I wanted it to be better than perfect.

In reality, it’s only damn near perfect.

You bloody well better buy this.

Here’s a link to the publishers web site where you can buy it directly-

Bear Alley Books

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