John Dangar DIXON: Obituary

Born Newcastle (New South Wales) February 20th 1929

Died Bonsall (California) May 7th 2015

John Dangar Dixon was born on February 20th 1929 in Newcastle, New South Wales the youngest of three children. As the only boy, it was always expected of John that he carry on the family tradition of becoming an engineer, a surveyor or an adventurer. His Great Grandfather, Robert Dixon, had been one of the first white men to explore the Goulburn Plains in the early 1800s, and a copy of Robert’s original plan to lay out the city of Brisbane (on March 24th 1840) remains in the John Oxley Library.[1]

John Dixon, however, always wanted to be a comic book or comic strip artist. As a schoolboy at East Kempsey Primary School, John was fascinated by the Sunday colour comics and fell under the spell of the works of the American masters of the craft, Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, and most particularly Milton Caniff. His father, a strict school headmaster at Stockton when John attended Newcastle High School, would have none of it. Comic artists were, after all, the worst kind of artists: the creators of literature that were forbidden from his father’s classrooms. So young John Dixon received no formal art training.

On December 7th 1941 – Pearl Harbour! The War had a startling and sudden impact on young people’s lives. American comics had become a recent and popular entertainment medium, but their importation was soon banned by the Australian Government. A local comic industry began to flourish. John Dixon had completed his education at Cooks Hill Intermediate High, and had become a trainee window dresser in a Newcastle softgoods store, before moving to Sydney in 1945 to obtain a series of positions within various Art Departments and Advertising Agencies. Living in a hostel at the time, John was encouraged by a mate to produce his own comic.

In his spare time, John wrote and illustrated an eighteen page story “The Sky Pirates” and submitted it to Sydney publisher, John Edwards of Leisure Productions. Dixon was immediately offered a full-time job as a comic writer and artist, which he “accepted with relish”.[2] Artists of the time were paid at a page rate, and Dixon was a fast worker: not only did he illustrate his stories, he wrote his adventures as well. He managed to produce 15 pages a week.

From an early age, John had always had a fascination with planes, so he created storylines that increasingly centred on flying. At 16 years of age, John Dixon created his first adventure character with continuity potential for his new employer – Tim Valour. The series under Dixon ran for about 150 issues. Due to his speed at producing comic stories, before long Dixon created and was writing and illustrating a second comic: The Crimson Comet. Although he worked on other characters, these were the comics that John Dixon is most fondly remembered for, in what is now termed The Golden Age of Australian Comics.

Two events lead to the end of that era in the late 1950s: the lifting of import restrictions, and the advent of television. The local comic market quickly contracted, and John Dixon had to find an alternative means to earn an income. He combined his fascination with outback flying involving the Royal Flying Doctor Service with the Northern Territory’s Police force and created a Sunday newspaper strip Air Hawk and the Flying Doctor. It wasn’t that easy – it took eighteen months before he could convince a newspaper editor to run with a local adventure serial in opposition to the cheaper imported syndicated strips of the day.

The Perth Weekend News was the first Australian newspaper to run the weekly Sunday strip in May 1959, with the Sydney Sun-Herald coming on board a fortnight later. Brisbane’s Sunday Mail and Adelaide’s Sunday Mail soon followed. Says Australian comic historian John Ryan: “Dixon scripts [were] well-written with plenty of action, drama, suspense, and characterisation. Air Hawk [was] played out against a background of cathedral-like ridges, barren landscapes, caverns, rivers and waterholes of the outback country. The setting [allowed] for the introduction of native fauna, Aborigines and their way of life and Dixon [captured] all of these with graphic authenticity.”[3]

John Dixon then met and married Eleanor and they chose to live at Bungen Head. From his productive comic book days, he had been able to purchase a block of land there. His sister Sheila said that one day John spent many back breaking hours clearing the scrub only to be confronted by an irate owner. He had cleared the wrong block and had to start all over again![4] The home had an art studio especially built, and this was used the whole time he worked on the Air Hawk comic strip.

In the early 1960s John met Brian Foley. Both men then had young children, and the connections between the two grew from social, then business and family relationships. Both would help each other out with “family needs, like baby-sitting or getting together for barbecues”.[5] The Sunday newspapers began clamouring for a daily version of Air Hawk, so in May 1963 John began working on his adventure strip seven days a week. John had always managed the marketing of the comic strip within Australia, and so Brian began to handle the overseas syndication of it. The Australian newspapers that ran the daily Air Hawk adventures included the Sydney Morning Herald and Brisbane’s Courier-Mail.

While John Dixon managed to continue writing the Sunday adventures, the pressures to maintain his high artistic standards seven days a week became too much. From about 1964, Dixon employed other Australian artists to assist. Michael Tabrett, Hart Amos, Paul Power and Keith Chatto all individually worked on the art for the Sunday Air Hawk adventures, until Dixon finally chose to discontinue the Sunday version in early 1980. In the meantime, the freedom to concentrate on his daily strip allowed Dixon to develop “a comic strip technique that was equal to any continuity artist in the world. Dixon continued to produce outstanding work and secured his place as the finest adventure strip artist Australia has produced.”[6] This was recognised with Brian Foley making sales around the world. Air Hawk appeared in newspaper from New Zealand, Hong Kong, South Africa, Ireland, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, Argentina and even to the United States of America.

By the mid-1980s, John felt that he was finding Air Hawk storylines harder to come by and was becoming “burnt out”.[7] In 1986, an opportunity came to work overseas in Washington DC as Art Director/Illustrator on a magazine founded by Australian Gregory Copley called Defense and Foreign Affairs. John accepted the offer, although he found the decision to leave Air Hawk “a difficult one”.[8] His new artistic role ensured that John had to learn new skills: to work both in colour and in oils. Shortly after John moved to the USA, Eleanor died suddenly of a heart attack.

John found the posting in the Defense and Foreign Affairs’ London office quite lonely, until his return to Washington DC. While there John met Sue, the magazine’s Accountant, and they married in 1989. With the end of the Cold War, however, the magazine folded and John had to seek alternative employment. From 1993 to 1995, John again worked in comics: illustrating superheroes tales such as “Eternal Warrior”, and “Solar: Man of the Atom” for Valiant Productions (based in New York). To show his artistic versatility as an illustrator, he also worked on story board work for movies, short films and commercials. In 1993, John and Sue permanently moved to California and he worked on Secret Agent X-9 (Corrigan) for the European comic book market.

John Dixon’s life-long work began to be recognised towards the end of his life. He rated the winning of the inaugural Australian Black & White Artists’ Club Award for “Best Illustrated Adventure Strip Artist” in 1985 as one of the “high points in his life with Air Hawk”.[9] The fact that it was presented by Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, he considered his “proudest moment”.[10]

He won the “Best Illustrated Adventure Strip Artist” Award again in 1986 (for Air Hawk), and in 1992 for his American comic book work. The Platinum Ledger Award for “Significant Contribution to Australian Comics” was presented to John in 2014 at a ceremony at the State Library of Victoria.

In his later years, John Dixon contracted Lewy Body Dementia. He was cared for at home by his wife Sue until he passed away on May 7th.    

In early 1990, I conducted an interview with John Dixon (from which many of the quotes in this Obituary have been taken). The interview was first published in 2002 (in Italian) in “Fumetto”, a high-quality magazine that specialised in comics. There was one question (and answer) from that initial interview with John that I did not supply and that – until now – has never been published. It is:

Q: “How would you like to be remembered?”

A: “Let’s see – I think I’d settle for being remembered as a story-teller with a tongue firmly planted in one cheek. To be remembered as someone who loved to share with others his fascinating world of imagination.”[11]

John Dixon, in his Air Hawk series from 1959 to 1986, shared his wonderful imagination of the Australian Outback and the characters therein …not just with Australians, but with the world. With his passing, we have lost Australia’s greatest comic strip story-teller. He leaves behind his wife Sue, his children Andrew, Jaydi, Cindy and Anne, his sister Sheila, his grandchildren Ben and Jake, his extended family, and his many Fans from around the globe.

This Obituary has been written with the full authorisation and input of John Dixon’s Family.


[1] Call number RBM 841.16 00003 e 1840

[2] Nat Karmichael interview with John Dixon, January 1990

[3] Panel by Panel: An illustrated history of Australian Comics (1979: 85). Cassell: Sydney.

[4] Written correspondence, Nat Karmichael with Sheila Cooke November 2009.

[5] Nat Karmichael interview with Brian Foley, August 2009.

[6] Panel by Panel: An illustrated history of Australian Comics (1979: 90). Cassell: Sydney.

[7] Community Radio Interview with Philip O’Brien, broadcast on May 31st 1997 (92.7 fm Canberra).

[8] Nat Karmichael interview with John Dixon, January 1990.

[9] Nat Karmichael interview with John Dixon, January 1990.

[10] Nat Karmichael interview with John Dixon, January 1990.

[11] Nat Karmichael interview with John Dixon, January 1990.