Strip cartoonist, born in Manchester, Greater Manchester, NW England, UK. Employed as a Post Office telegraph boy, he contributed his first strip to the Post Office staff magazine in 1937. In 1950 he designed a Christian comic for boys, which eventually became the Eagle, featuring the adventures of Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, a painted strip which introduced a unique authenticity through Hampson's use of human models and carefully modelled spaceships.
Frank Hampson (21 December 1918 - July 1985) was an illustrator and is best known for being the creator and artist of Dan Dare and other characters in the British boys' comic, the Eagle, to which he contributed between 1950 and 1959.
He was born at 488 Audenshaw Road, Audenshaw, Manchester (now Tameside).
In 1949, in collaboration with Christian vicar, Rev.
Following (some say) Alex Raymond and Milton Caniff in the U.S., Hampson instigated a studio system where, from his home in Epsom, Surrey, as many as four artists might work on two pages of strip at any one time. When Hulton Press was bought up in 1959, and the Eagle moved to a new publisher, Hampson's studio was disbanded.
He had one last great strip to draw, The Road of Courage, his carefully researched and meticulously crafted Life of Christ. Hampson then began to devise seven other strip cartoon ideas, which he intended to offer to the Eagle.
Hampson was voted prestigioso maestro at an international convention of strip cartoon and animated film artists held at Lucca in Tuscany in 1975. A jury of his peers gave him a Yellow Kid Award and declared him to be the best writer and artist of strip cartoons since the end of the Second World War.
In ailing health, Hampson died from a stroke and the lingering effects of throat cancer in July 1985, in Surrey, England.
Trivia
In 1978 he graduated from the Open University. Naturally he celebrated by drawing a Dan Dare strip for the University's internal magazine.
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