Look & Learn No 872 (30 September 1978) - Into The Unknown: Riddle of the Colonel Who Never Came Back

Grail Alert!

Magisterial image by Oliver Frey of missing Amazon explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett (of 'Lost City of Z' fame), re-imagined as as a Colonel Kurtz-style ruler of a lost civilisation, a la 'Apocalypse Now' (a year before that move was released!).

Crazy, scary stuff for a kids educational magazine like Look & Learn, and I lapped the terror and glory of this mage as a kid. All of Frey's DPS images for this series were crazily good pieces of narrative history painting; an inspiration to me as a child.

This page is the right-hand panel of a DPS. Images below show what it looked like originally, and how it came to me mounted as a single image, and what looked like after I had carefully removed the mount. This revealed a few things. The page had been masked-off twice, once for original publication (the top of the image) and once for a presumed republication (the thick white strip to the right, and a thin strip to the left), which is possibly when the left-hand panel was discarded (the text as the base also implies a later republication as a single image). Sadly the right hand strip is too firmly affixed to be removed without damaging the paint surface, though I was able to remove the thin left-hand strip.

The top strip also contained some textual information, but was too damaged to read more than 'Look & Learn', and a date of 'Sept', 'pages 8/9'. The rear of the piece also shows that it was glued to another sheet at some point, but removed before it was mounted. The fading to the image revealed when I remove the upper tape and mount also implies that it was hung in direct light for some time.

I contacted Oli, but he had not received this work back, and did not know when it had been republished, or when the left panel was discarded. He only had two of the 15 or so DPS painted for this series returned; the rest are, like Colonel Fawcett, lost forever.

Gouache on water-colour paper
Paper 32 x 48 cms
Image 31.5 x 45 cms