Oliver Strange, Maurice Bramley and 'Sudden', Revisited

Few posts I've written for this blog attracted more widespread interest than when I wrote about the pulp novel cowboy hero, nicknamed 'Sudden', back in 2007. James Green was a Western gunfighter, nicknamed 'Sudden' because of his lightning-fast gun-draw reflex. He was created by the British author Oliver Strange, and - to the best of my knowledge - first appeared in Strange's 1930 novel, The Range Robbers. In the 1960s, Frederick Nolan, then working as an manuscript reader and editor at Corgi Books (UK), wrote several further 'Sudden' novels under the pen-name "Frederick H. Christian", commencing with Sudden Strikes Back (1966).
I'd previously speculated about whether the 'Sudden' novels were the inspiration for a comic-book series, also titled 'Sudden', written and drawn by Maurice Bramley (1898-1975), which appeared in The Fast Gun comic magazine published by Page Publications (Australia) in the early 1970s. And, thanks to some recent online trawling, I can safely say the answer is "Yes".

I was doing some research into The World's News (1901-1957), a weekly news and entertainment magazine which, by the early 1930s, had been acquired by Associated Newspapers (Sydney, Australia). To the best of my knowledge, Bramley - who'd emigrated to Australia from New Zealand - began working as an artist on The World's News by the early 1930s, illustrating covers and drawing countless interior illustrations for short stories and feature articles appearing in the magazine. Amazingly, the National Library of Australia's Trove website holds scanned reproductions for nearly the entire run of The World's News. Furthermore, a keyword search reveals that Bramley was illustrating episodes of the "Sudden" novels as they were serialised in The World's News from at least the late 1930s onwards, as the double-page spread seen below attests (Apologies in advance for the poor quality image, taken with my ageing smartphone's camera).

The 'Sudden' serials were apparently a popular feature with readers of The World's News, which frequently promoted each new 'Sudden' story with an illustrated front cover, often drawn by Bramley himself. Given his long association with Oliver Strange's quick-draw gunfighter, I think it's safe to say that Bramley used elements of the original 'Sudden' stories as the basis for his own cowboy comic book hero, Jim Sedden, also known to friend and foe alike as...'Sudden'! (Cover image of Sudden - Gold Seeker taken from Good Reads).



'Sudden Rides Again' - The World's News, 14 January, 1939