In 1950 she joined the team of figure artists, under Frank Hampson, producing illustrations for the Dan Dare adventure stories that were the cover feature of the Eagle weekly comic, first published in July that year. She worked closely with Hampson's principal assistant, Harold Johns, translating Hampson's pencil sketches into colour blocked line-drawings for stories that appeared in the first five volumes of the Eagle. When Hampson fell ill, she and Johns produced the artwork for the third series of Dare's adventures, Marooned on Mercury (scripted by Chad Varah), and the pair were also responsible for illustrating several Dare strips in the first three Eagle Annuals.[2]
In the early days of their operation, the team in Hampson's studio worked under considerable time pressure, and Tomlinson later recalled that she was “regularly drawing at three and four o'clock in the morning”.[3] In order to capture the realism of figure posture, facial expression and clothing folds, Hampson liked to draw from life or from photographs taken in the studio, and Tomlinson became the physical model for the character Professor Jocelyn Peabody,[4] “a first class geologist, botanist, agriculturalist and a qualified space pilot”.[5] Peabody was a prominent figure in the Dare stories and an influential one in a broader sphere, the character's capabilities and courage helping to challenge the stereotypical images of women more familiar to the Eagle’s impressionable young audience in the 1950s.
In 1953 Johns and Tomlinson accepted a personal commission from another studio and, although this had been authorised by Marcus Morris, the Eagle’s editor, Hampson was displeased and dismissed them both. Tomlinson bore him no ill will and appeared prominently in a 1990 ITV documentary, Future Perfect, celebrating his work.[6]