Ledger of Honour 2019 - Stanley and Reginald Pitt

The Ledger Awards were launched in 2005 to formally recognize both outstanding new works by Australian comic book/graphic novel creators, as well as acknowledge the work of earlier writers and artists who made historically significant contributions to Australian comics. The 2019 Ledger Awards Annual is now available to download as a single PDF file from the Ledger Awards website, and is an invaluable record of the many diverse and exciting new comics and graphic novels currently published in Australia.

This year's posthumous Ledger of Honour went to Stanley and Reginald Pitt, two brothers who created some of the most memorable Australian comic strip and comic magazine series published in the 1940s and 1950s. These included Silver Starr and the Flameworld, Yarmak - Jungle King Comic, and Captain Power, along with their unfinished masterpiece, Gully Foyle - the ill-fated comic-strip adaptation of Alfred Bester's science-fiction novel, The Stars My Destination.

I was invited to write a bio-bibliographic essay on Stanley and Reginald Pitt for the 2019 Ledger Awards Annual, in recognition of their posthumous Ledger of Honour award. One brief section of my original essay manuscript was, however, omitted from the published version - presumably due to space limitations. For the sake of completion, I'm reprinting the omitted text below, which should have appeared after the penultimate paragraph on page 34 of the 2019 Ledger Awards Annual:

Newspaper comic strips, unlike comic magazines, were held in high regard by the general public, and successful adventure-serial comic strips which compelled readers to buy the next day’s edition were especially prized by newspaper editors. Reg and Stan Pitt were keen to enter this prestigious field, and devoted their energies to creating a daily comic-strip featuring Lemmy Caution, an FBI agent created by British novelist Peter Cheyney (1896-1951). They produced numerous sample episodes of the Lemmy Caution strip, and had secured interest from several newspapers in France, where a series of Lemmy Caution films, starring the American-born actor While the unpublished Lemmy Caution newspaper strip forms a relatively minor part of Stanley and Reginald Pitt's overall body of work, it is nevertheless indicative of their creative ambitions and prodigious output during the 1950s. Having tasted some measure of local success selling comic strips to Sydney newspapers, the Pitt brothers continued to invest time and energy in pursuing their lifelong goal to create a syndicated newspaper comic strip.

While I've intermittently referred to Stanley Pitt's work in numerous posts published elsewhere on this blog, I have written more extensively about Reginald Pitt's latter career as an abstract painter, culminating in my tribute to Reginald Pitt, following his death in 2010. While I have yet to republish my 2007 article on the Pitt brother's acclaimed Gully Foyle comic strip - it appeared on the now-defunct Pulpfaction.net website - I published a brief postscript about the entire "Gully Foyle" saga in June 2008, which can be read here.