"Captain Flame", Knock-Out, 1949
Septimus Edwin Scott was born in Sunderland on 19 March 1879. His father, George Scott, was a coal agent. He and studied at the Royal College of Art in London, and by 1903 he was exhibiting his landscape and portrait paintings at the Royal Academy. He was elected an associate of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1919, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 1920 and Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1927.
As an illustrator, he contributed to periodicals including The Graphic and The Red Magazine, painted colour plates for editions of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island, and illustrated a number of Ladybird Books.
During the First World War he painted propaganda posters for the Ministry of Munitions, and from the 1920s he worked in advertising, painting posters for Lifebuoy soap, Mars chocolate bars and Players cigarettes, among many other products. His art was probably most widely known through railway company posters such as one for the London & North Eastern Railway to advertise rail services to Newcastle's North East Coast Exhibition, open from May to October 1929.
In 1948 he was recruited by Amalgamated Press editor Leonard Matthews to draw historical adventure comic strips. He illustrated the pirate series "Captain Flame" for Knock-Out from 1948 to 1953, and "The King's Captain" for The Comet from 1951 to 1952, both strips written by Matthews. He drew five issues of Thriller Comics Library, which also reprinted his "Captain Flame" and "King's Captain" serials, and painted 108 covers for the title, and several for Cowboy Comics Library, War Picture Library and Swift. He also drew strips for the girls' title Princess ("Jane Eyre", 1966) and the nursery titles Playhour ("Prince the Wonder Dog", 1954-55) and Jack and Jill ("Uncle Ben", 1961), and contributed illustrations to the educational magazine Look and Learn. He worked in comics until shortly before his death, in Brighton in the third quarter of 1966.
References[]
- Alan Clark, Dictionary of British Comic Artists, Writers and Editors, The British Library, 1998, p. 152
- Denis Gifford, Encyclopedia of Comic Characters, Longman, 1987, p. 170
- Norman Wright and David Ashford, Masters of Fun and Thrills: The British Comic Artists Vol 1, Norman Wright (pub.), 2008, pp. 170-179
