Vintage Comic Book Cutaways and Sci-Fi Models from Modern Fred

Recently, one of our operatives directed Telstar Logistics toward the Flickr presence of a gentleman who goes by the name of Modern Fred. The name itself seemed intriguing, but things got even better when we plugged Modern Fred's Internet coordinates into our World Wide Web browser. Within seconds we found ourselves staring at an eye-popping collection of vintage comic book cutaway illustrations:

We oogled the illustrations with admiration and awe, noted that they were all created by an illustrator named Leslie Ashwell Wood, then fired an urgent message off to Modern Fred via electrionic mail: Where did these come from? What was Eagle Comics? What's the backstory?

A short while later we recevied a message from Mr. Fred Barr, aka Modern Fred.  In it he explained:

I found Eagle comics by way of my interest in Dan Dare, the British SciFi character who was the major feature in Eagle -- he was sort of a combination of Steve Canyon and Flash Gordon with a typical stiff-upper-lip gentleman officer personality. (Maybe he's more of a combination of Biggles and Buck Rogers come to think of it). The Eagle was the major template for British boys' comics, and TV21, which is what my generation had, was definitely modeled upon it. The delightfully detailed cutaways in each issue were transformed into amazing cutaways of the vehicles from Gerry Anderson's television programmes in TV21.

I had seen issues of Eagle many times but never had any in the flesh. It was remarkable to see all the content. The Dan Dare comic was remarkably drawn and coloured, easily influencing the Thunderbirds comic by Frank Bellamy. But getting a good look at the cutaways it's easy to see the artists who worked upon them were tremendously talented fellows, and there's a real sense of treating the intelligence of the audience -- schoolboys of the 1950s -- with respect, as there's no "dumbing down" or shortcuts taken.

Very cool.  Yet apart from having a keen eye for comic book illustration, Modern Fred also turns out to be an extremely skilled maker of scale models depicting classic bits of science fiction technology.  For example, check out this scratchbuilt (!!!) model Fred built of the Chariot vehicle from Lost in Space:

And this massive diorama of the International Rescue headquarters from the Thunderbirds:

And this geekalicious model of the bridge from the original USS Enterprise:

What can we say, but... Wow!  Fred's Flickr site is fertile ground for some very satisfying procrastination, so we heartily encourage you to beam aboard.

LINKS:
Vintage Comics and Books (Flickr photoset by Modern Fred)

Models (Flickr photoset by Modern Fred)

PREVIOUSLY:
The Intimate Industrial Illustrations of Frank Soltesz

"Flight thru Instruments" and the Fine Art of Instructional Illustration

Merry Shopping: Inside the 1962 Sears Christmas Catalog

(IMAGES: All images from Modern Fred, reproduced here with permission.)

Comments

[dr.hypercube]

Like you, I recently fell over Modern Fred's Flickrstream. Two add'l notes:
- if I read the comments here correctly, Fred is responsible for the box art on a soon to be released 1:24 model of the Chariot. Looks like it's time to fire up the airplane glue (not literally). (BTW - I'm Don Coyote on Flickr - just for context).
- the stream I jumped from - Signor Marcello Poletti's - is well worth keeping an eye on. As an example - this wicked awesome screencap of Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

[Aircraft database]

The Chariot vehicle !!! So cool! Too bad it's not available in stores - also too bad the fact I'm 35 now instead of 10 years old...