EXTRACTS: PIRATE TALES Fleetway Picture Library Classics © 2020 Book Palace Books * 272 PAGES IN FULL EDITION

FLEETWAY PICTURE LIBRARY ™ CLA SS IC S 4 an ordinary comic, this lavish colour publication didn’t make it to a second issue. When Stephen Frances decided to publish a series of tough, American-style gangster thrillers featuring ‘Hank Janson’, he turned to Mendoza for a logo. The resulting near silhouette of a figure in a slouch hat, hands deep in the pockets of a private eye’s trench coat, cigarette in his mouth, appeared on the title page of dozens of cheap ‘Hank Janson’ bestselling paperbacks and became an iconic image. Mendoza also painted covers for the ‘Hank Janson’ novels and magazine. When Frances began writing another series of crime novels (under the name of Duke Linton) for the publishers, Scion Ltd., he introduced Mendoza to the firm. The result was that Mendoza became one of Scion’s most prolific cover artists, tackling most types of genre, signing his work with his own name or frequently with a number of different nom de plumes, including Ferrari, Gomez, Garcia, Grimaldi and Zero. In 1951 Mendoza was given commissions by the more ‘up market’ paperback publishers, Pan books. His cover images for Pan, all incidentally signed this time with his own name, are extremely striking, particularly the vivid design for Dashiell Hammett’s ‘The Maltese Falcon’, the simple but evocative cover for Rider Haggard’s ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ and the powerful staring face that he painted for E. Phillips Oppenheim’s ‘The Great Impersonation’. It was in that same year that Mendoza’s career in comics really began, for it was then that he started to contribute to the largest of the UK’s comic publishers, the Amalgamated Press. His first contributions were to the Thriller Comics Library , designing covers for ‘Treasure Island’, Gulliver’s Travels’ and ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ (for which he also contributed the full-length picture strip version of the story). He drew four short adventure strips featuring Robin Hood and The Three Musketeers and then went on to draw another eight full-length strips, each one totally different in subject matter. Probably the most striking of these latter strips were his versions of the Edgar Wallace mystery story, ‘The Green Archer’ and ‘The Rogue’s Moon’, featuring Blackbeard the pirate. Based on Robert W. Chambers’ novel first published in 1929, ‘Rogue’s Moon’ is one of the very best pirate yarns to appear in the Thriller Comics Library . Mendoza splendidly captures the brutality and mendaciousness of these cut-throat pirates. Seldom have these sea wolves appeared so frighteningly and realistically fierce and brutal. This highly successful adaptation of Chambers’ yarn is, of course, enhanced by the evocative cover painting by Septimus E. Scott. Although Mendoza contributed a few western strips and covers for the Cowboy Comics Library , one particular issue of the Super Detective Library stands out: ‘The Island of Fu Manchu’. As with his ‘Rogue’s Moon’, the strip is infused with an atmosphere of malevolent evil, perfectly capturing the essence of Sax Rohmer’s novel. Throughout his career in comics, Mendoza worked almost exclusively for the Amalgamated Press, contributing strips for Sun and Comet , most notably for the latter comic, the long-running adventures of ‘Strongbow the Mohawk’. Towards the end of his career, however, he turned his back on adventure strips and became a nursery comic artist, delineating cute woodland animals for the new nursery comics, Playhour and Harold Hare’s Own . This really was a startling metamorphosis: from an artist renowned for his rugged, action- packed, macho characters, Mendoza had turned into one who could draw anthropomorphic animals with the best of them. These nursery pictures and strips were executed with the greatest delicacy and Mendoza’s animals were imbued with truly infectious personalities.Mendoza never stopped drawing. His daughter said that she could “barely ever remember him not at his desk working” and, even at the very end of his life, he continued to draw. She treasures his last sketchbook—the one he had with him in hospital when he died.