The Eagle Annual of the Cutaways

Book excerpt: After Dan Dare, the most famous and fondly remembered part of the Eagle comic was the cutaway. Basically, these were beautifully detailed drawings of the inner workings of pretty much anything: from steam trains, jet liners and racing cars, to oil wells, suspension bridges and tube lines beneath Piccadilly Circus. The Eagle had a team of three or four artists, but the king of the cutaway was undoubtedly L. Ashwell Wood, whose forensic attention to detail -- be it a cross section of the Cutty Sark or a grand landscape of how electricity is generated -- enthralled a generation of school boys.