Bill Baker is one of many talented British artists lost to anonymity. Active between the 1950s and 1970s, Baker worked via the Temple Art Agency for a wide range of boys' and girls' titles, yet his name is almost unknown and I have been unable to track down any biographical information beyond the fact that his name was William G. Baker.
His earliest traced appearance is in the pages of
Top Spot, where he drew one-off strips in 1959. A year later he could be found in the pages of
Girl, drawing the strip 'New Rider at Clearwater'. This was the start of a fairly long association with that paper, as Baker went on to illustrate '21 Newlands Park', a long-running text serial that ran between 1961 and 1964.
Baker remained within the pages of girls' comics for at least 15 years, contributing to
Princess Tina ('Life with Tina'),
June ('Call Me Cupid', 'Wedding in the Family') and providing illustrations for
Pixie Annual 1974, some of which can be seen in this column.
Baker went on to produce some of his finest work in the pages of
Look and Learn, adapting novels by Jack London ('The Call of the Wild' and 'The Sea Wolf'), Jules Verne ('20,000 Leagues Under the Sea'), Miguel de Cervantes ('Don Quixote'), Edgar Allen Poe ('The Fall of the House of Usher'), Mark Twain ('The Prince and the Pauper'), Herman Melville ('Moby Dick'), Charles Kingsley ('Westward Ho!') and Charles Dickens ('A Tale of Two Cities'). Baker also did the occasional illustration for features (at least one dating back as far as 1964).
These strips ran in
Look and Learn between 1974 and 1978, some of them brief but others, like 'A Tale of Two Cities' more substantial, running for three months. All shared a wealth of detail and some, like his two-part adaptation of 'The Fall of the House of Usher', are little gems that deserve to be reprinted.
Examples of Baker's artwork for sale
can be found here.
