guy.lawley@btinternet.com

Sexton Blake was a front runner in the ‘Rivals of Sherlock Holmes’ stakes, first appearing in 1893, just six years after the Great Detective himself. Blake is sometimes referred to as as ‘the office-boy’s Sherlock Holmes’, perhaps in part because Dorothy L. Sayers wrote the office boy in Murder Must Advertise (1933), a Lord Peter Wimsey novel, as an avid reader of Blake’s adventures. This might have been a nod to Sayers’ own attempt to write a Blake story many years previously, which she had abandoned — the story in which Wimsey himself had first appeared as a supporting character.

Sexton Blake probably endured longer than the occupation of ‘office boy’; the last new Blake material was reportedly written in 1978. That legacy was a little shorter than it should have been. It’s well-known that the 1966 TV hero Adam Adamant, a Victorian gentleman adventurer revived from suspended animation in the modern world, was originally intended to be Blake. A similar substitution, again reportedly due to uncertain IP rights, occurred with the detective character ‘Victor Drago’ in the 1979 British weekly comic Tornado. After several episodes of script and artwork had been completed, the names of Blake, his assistant Tinker and Pedro the bloodhound were whited out and replaced by new ones, chosen to fit into the spaces left in captions and speech balloons.

For more Drago and more Parker, you are welcome to click on the page below. (But please come back!)

Mike Dorey’s splendid artwork on the Drago comic was true to Blake’s appearance as depicted by his foremost artist Eric Parker (1898-1974), who established a definitive and lasting likeness back in the 1920s. Parker continued to illustrate Blake on covers and inside pages of magazines like Union Jack and Sexton Blake Library (SBL) until in the mid-1950s, when the detective had a modernising make-over. Parker has long been a major favourite of mine, and greatly admired too by the author Michael Moorcock, who as a young assistant editor on the new-look SBL brought Parker back for few last hurrahs.

For a full biography of Parker, and more great images, click on this 1932 Parker cover.

Apart from his long-term association with Sexton Blake, and a long, varied and prolific career as an illustrator of other material, Parker was a superb comic strip artist. It’s surprising, then, that he only had one brief stint on a Blake comic strip. A Sexton Blake strip ran from 1939 to 1960 in the weekly anthology comic Knockout. Eric Parker’s contribution, a complete adventure called The Secret of Monte Cristo occupied two pages every week for fourteen weeks, beginning on January the 8th 1949.

The strip led off the black-and white interior pages of Knockout, which had colour only on its front and back covers. Clicking the cover below should take you to a full-size version.

Because it was on the verso of the front cover, in my copies the first page of each Blake two-pager has over time acquired some bleed-though of ink — mostly red, the colour most susceptible to this problem. I have corrected for this to some extent on the pages below.

Click on a page to seen enlargeable version, and hit the back arrow on your browser to return here.

Without further ado then: all 28 pages of the rarely seen Secret of Monte Cristo.
(Please let me know in the comments if you’d like to see more Eric Parker comics from my old volumes of Knockout.).