Petr, I had a terrific resource for my drawings back then (circa early Forties). I had a subscription to "Flying" magazine. Each issue had a fold-out page (à la Playmate of the Month) featuring, on one side, a list of dimensions and specifications and several photographs, and on the other, a cutaway drawing—of planes like the Curtiss P-40, the P-51 Mustang, or the B-25 Mitchell bomber. They were so detailed that I sometimes wondered if they were inadvertently revealing military secrets. I used to go over those drawings for hours and make study sketches of them before I'd put them into my strips.

My sister's husband (now a retired airline pilot) used to fly jet fighters (the Northrup F-89 Scorpion) for the Air National Guard. One afternoon a couple of decades ago, he took me out to the Sand Point Naval Air Station in northeast Seattle to see an "antique aircraft." It was a B-25 Mitchell. I had studied photos and drawings of them and had drawn them hundreds of times, but I'd never seen one for real. I spent a heart-pounding, bug-eyed afternoon crawl all around and through that plane. WOW!!!

Don Firth