Nationality British | Known for Drawing and Comics | |
Full Name William "Billy" Ward Born 1927 London Died 24 July 1996, London, United Kingdom | ||
Bill Ward (also called William or Billy, 1927–1996) was a British erotic artist. He is best known for his strips featuring bear-like men and in particular his Adventures of Drum series for Drummer magazine.
Contents
life and work
Born in London he lived almost all his life in the city with exception of a three-year tour in the Army. His publishing career began as a copyboy in newspaper publishing before becoming an art editor for children's comics and then a freelance graphic artist. He worked as a graphic artist for Amalgamated Press and Fleetway on children's comics, notably their Thriller series (November 1951 – May 1963). His influences were Burne Hogarth's Tarzan, Hal Foster's Prince Valiant and Milton Caniff.
In 1957 Ward had his first erotic drawings published discretely in the British physique magazine Male Classics and also in Physique Pictorial. Unusually these were initialled and credited to him by name. It is possible that he also used the pseudonym Tristano. He did not produce sexually explicit works until he had retired from reliance on mainstream comic work. Homosexual sex and images portraying and encouraging it were illegal in the period before 1967. During the 1970s he was working for the Mansell Collection, a commercial picture archive which was housed at 42 Linden Gardens; he was living there with actor Brian Rawlinson in an outbuilding that served as his own studio. The picture collection and the house was owned by Louie Boutroy (1903–1993) and run with her unofficial adopted son and protégée George Anderson and his life partner Harold, who also lived at the house.
Career after 1970
Ward began to produced strips (King) for both the British and American magazines from about 1976. In Britain these appeared in Him and Zipper magazines under the editorship of Alex McKenna, as well as Sam and Daddy. It was his work for the American magazines Manifest Reader, Stroke and Drummer that made him well known. Apart from King, his characters included the muscular sexual adventurer Drum, a clueless comic character Zeke and Rogan a space cop, as well as illustrations to Robert Payne's The Exchange. His work features in the same issue of Drummer (magazine) that includes Robert Mapplethorpe's first commissioned cover (issue 24, September 1978) under the editorship of Jack Fritscher. Collections were published by Alternate Publishing in San Franscisco [The Adventures of Drum, The Fantastic Adventures of Bill Ward] and under the Meat Men imprint of gay comics. The artist was in regular contact with others in the field: he corresponded with Harry Bush and the artist Rex was an admirer and owns work by Ward. In the 1990s, now living in Stratford with his then partner Christie's silver expert Stephen Helliwell, both were diagnosed with AIDS and died within a few month of each other in 1996
Legacy
Some of his work remained with his 'dowager partner' Brian Rawlinson but eventually the studio at Linden Gardens, filled with piles of magazines and detritus, needed clearing. With no idea what to do with the explicit drawings he had been left with, they were due go in the same skip as the rest of the contents. Fortunately Bill's model for his character Drum, Robert Bremner (1947-2003), a fellow member with Bill of the London MSC leather club heard about it with only a day to spare. With Rawlinson's blessing and the help of artist Guy Burch, they sifted the material to extract an archive of work and related ephemera. Bremner also died of AIDS but the works are still cared for and kept together by Burch who has tried to promote it on a non-commercial basis. The explicit nature of many drawings make this difficult but the Archive supplied information for ‘Comics Unmasked, Art and Anarchy in the UK' at the British Library, which featured him as one of two British gay erotic comic illustrators. Ward's work will be included in 'Tommorrow's Man' an exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act in 2017. The Japanese Manga artist GengorohTagame cites Ward as an influence.