Pikitia Press Blog: nigel green

The Lion Summer Spectacular Epic Holiday Special featured comic and prose adaptions of films from the late sixties. Batman, James Bond: You Only Live Twice, Thunderbirds, and more were featured along with an Oliver Passingham (1925-2003) adaption of the Arthur Hiller film, TOBRUK. Passingham's career started on newspaper strips such as Lesley Shane, Rick Martin, Jane Fortune and Sally Marsh during the fifties. Reprints of his Lesley Shane newspaper strips by Amalgamated Press led to work on Rick Random, School Friend and other Amalgamated titles. In the sixties Passingham commenced work with DC Thomson where he would freelance for a further 33 years. During the seventies Passingham traveled, living in the Canaries, on the French Riviera, Monte Carlo and a year in Sydney, Australia during 1980, eventually returning to London in 1990. During this time he continued producing work for DC Thomson until his retirement in 1993.

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The original board of the first page of Passingham's TOBRUK adaption is comprised of a photostat reproduction of the Tobruk movie poster as a header, a moody night scene depicted in inky washes, and two panels showing frogmen sabotaging a french freighter, depicted with ink line drawings and white paint highlights. Upon examining the art-board I found Passingham had originally depicted the entire scene in washes as shown below with the bottom two panels still visible under the pasted on replacement.

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My presumption for the redrawn panels is that Passingham may have been compelled by editorial to redraw the characters to resemble their movie counterparts. He certainly nails the likeness of star George Peppard in the bottom panel close up. In those days of no video or internet reference Passingham did a fine job of capturing the scale of the movie and compressing it into the limits of a comic anthology.