Pryde of the RAF - a mystery!

A recent sale by Phil-Comics (check them out here) had this intriguing item up for sale. It's a piece of original comic art for a comic strip very much in the Eagle mould - the artboard used is the same as a Dan Dare artboard I have, the instructions at the bottom of the art are also the same. However, the story seems never to have been published.

Googling 'Pryde' and 'comics' just brings you up a lot of references to Kitty Pryde of the X-Men.

Dave Pryde seems like a clever, goal-scoring centre-forward, boxing champion kind of guy. Perfect for Eagle!

As a full colour strip that's clearly ready for production it's a mystery why it wasn't published.

Maybe it was for Swift rather than Eagle?

Or maybe a strip for an annual (EXCEPT that there were very few colour strips in the early 1950s Hulton press annuals) - so probably a comic rather than an annual. 

To me the art style is very reminiscent of Edward Kearon - best known for his black & white work on the Robot Archie strip in Lion.

I'm not an expert on Kearon but his work seems to have been exclusively in black & white - so this is a rare chance to see his colour work. 

We'll never know what would have happened next - best I suspect that Dave would have landed the 'plane without too many problems

Here's a Robot Archie page by Kearon - I think the hairstyles of the characters is very similar (as well as the figure work generally).

The page recently sold for £62 - the seller was phil-comics and the art had previously been the property of renowned comics artist Jim Baikie.

UPDATED: friend of the blog Jeremy Briggs points out that the plane is an Airspeed Oxford used by the RAF during WWII and into the 1950s as a bomber trainer so it would have been contemporary with early Eagle and Swift.