Football's Comic Book Heroes

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Scorcher was the name of a football-themed British comic magazine published by IPC between January 1970 and October 1974. Scorcher featured various well-known comic strips, such as Billy's Boots, Bobby of the Blues and Lags Eleven, a story about a prison football team. In addition, the Nipper strip was absorbed from the Score comic, and Hot Shot Hamish made its first appearance after that. Some of these stories later found homes in Roy of the Rovers and in Tiger. This Agreement will be governed by the laws of The United States, without reference to rules governing choice of laws. You may not assign this Agreement, by operation of law or otherwise, without our prior written consent. Subject to that restriction, this Agreement will be binding on, inure to the benefit of, and be enforceable against the parties and their respective successors and assigns. Our failure to enforce your strict performance of any provision of this Agreement will not constitute a waiver of our right to subsequently enforce such provision or any other provision of this Agreement.

Clearly Charles Schulz used baseball as a metaphor for life. But the question is what about Charlie Brown’s record in the sport itself? Unfortunately for IPC/Fleetway, the Daily Mail spotted it. Under the headline "Comic Strip Hooligans", journalist Joe Steeples fumed at the comic "read by 180,000 children each week" and accused it "of pandering to violence". Alan Hardaker, the Football League secretary, was invited to condemn it and seized the chance with both hands. "It is really appalling that there are people so brain-less as to sell comics to children with stuff like this inside them," he said. "The man responsible ought to be hit over the head with a bottle himself." You may not issue any press release with respect to this Agreement or your participation in the Program; such action may result in your termination from the Program. In addition, you may not in any manner misrepresent or embellish the relationship between us and you, say you develop our products, say you are part of Personalised Football Comics or express or imply any relationship or affiliation between us and you or any other person or entity except as expressly permitted by this Agreement (including by expressing or implying that we support, sponsor, endorse, or contribute money to any charity or other cause). Tomlinson’s success with Roy of the Rovers made him an industry legend before he retired in the Nineties. He’s a light entertainer at heart who talks about Roy as if he’s real: when I meet him at his home in rural Lincolnshire, he punctuates the conversation by handing me signed drawings he has had an artist prepare earlier ("Roy popped in earlier and left this for you, Richard!"). Leafing through his old copies, I ask if it was a conscious decision to mix hooliganism, indiscipline and corruption with the stories. "Not really," he says. "The writer and I would talk about the general situation over a long lunch, try to put the world to rights and agree to put things in the storyline. Tom Tully was happy to involve Roy in harsher things, but there was no conscious decision. While Tomlinson was launching the Roy of the Rovers comic, elsewhere in Fleetway House trouble was brewing. Pat Mills, a freelance writer who had recently created the hard-Big Match Preview: illustrated preview of a big match for the following week-end. This week: Southampton versus Everton. On its launch in 1979, the magazine initially failed to catch the dominant circulation of its main weekly football rival,"Shoot". In the mid 1990s, under editor Chris Hunt, it overtook Shoot to become the biggest selling football title in Britain, with its weekly sales peaking at 242,000 during this period. This not only marked the highest point in the magazine's sales history, but the high watermark of the British football magazine market in the 1990s.In the face of such market dominance by "Match", during this period many of its rival titles either closed or, in the case of "Shoot", changed frequency to monthly. Byrd of Paradise Hill: Richard Byrd prefers to take up a teaching post at Paradise Hill Secondary Modern School, rather than the offer of a trial for Hampton Orient reserves.

A number of notable football journalists have started their careers at Match, including Mark Irwin of The Sun, Hugh Sleight of Four Four Two, Paul Smith of The Sunday Mirror, Ray Ryan formerly with The News of the World and Rob Shepherd.

It was all a bit wrong, though. Because Roy Race was originally a successor to old-school British adventurers like Dan Dare; he’s usually thought of as a doughty hero with a big side of righteous manliness. That might have been true in the Fifties, but in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, Roy — a talented but trouble-prone number nine who played for Melchester Rovers and married the gorgeous, feisty club secretary Penny — was part of an unofficial, now mostly forgotten, experiment in comics that saw him and other characters dealing with the darker sides of football. It was a new direction that involved real-life stars of entertainment, tabloid scandals, football violence, political pressure groups, the royal family, a threat to virtually close down Britain’s biggest magazine publisher and a debate in the House of Commons. The aim was to make comics relevant to a new generation of kids, and out of it came comics that deserve to be celebrated more than they are, and certainly more than some of the A-meh-rican superhero stuff dissected by contemporary nerdtellectuals. Thankfully, the balance may be about to shift, because the experiment is, to an extent, being revived by Roy’s current custodians. Your login may only be used by one person – a single login shared by multiple people is not permitted. I had outgrown the comic by then, but people from that time talk about being upset by the story, and Tomlinson is uncharacteristically reticent about it. "Not one of my better decisions," he says. "There were indignant letters to the management, and… all I can say now is, we were trying new ideas and that wasn’t a good one." Most of us would forgive him now, I say. He goes to fetch his cardboard cut-out of Roy from the garage so I can take a selfie with him.

This is real Roy of the Rovers stuff!" whooped Clive Tyldesley when Kane scored against Colombia. "Harry Kane [is] the Roy of the Rovers comic-book hero, leading the line and getting the glory," proclaimed Reuters. "It’s an old cliché about Roy of the Rovers," advised The Times, "but [he] really is." It was the crowd that told us what was happening given that action replays weren’t really possible. You might say they were the comic book equivalent of the chorus in ancient Greek theatre. That’s the danger of a little learning, isn’t it? Scorcher Team of the Week: a different schoolboy team featured each week has their team photograph published and wins a Scorcher football.

Melchester Rovers, the club he joined as a 16-year-old and subsequently captained, are sometimes said to have been based on the Arsenal sides of the Fifties, but seemed like they could be from anywhere. What really set the strip apart right from the outset was its closeness to real life. That was largely due to the work of the original artist Joe Colquhoun, a legend of British comics, who took great care not just with on-pitch action but with stadia, crowds and players’ off-duty clothes, and soon began writing the stories, too (which was unusual; stories were generally written frame by frame by the writer and then passed to the artist to illustrate). It also helped that Tiger’s editor Derek Birnage courted Bobby Charlton, and for several years from 1960, Charlton was credited as the official Roy of the Rovers writer, though it’s probably likely that Birnage was doing the real work. Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, a notorious, opportunistic conservative campaign group, then weighed in, along with a group calling itself the Delegates Opposing Violent Education. On the early evening current affairs show Nationwide, the avuncular presenter Frank Bough tore up the comic live on air. At one point that autumn, the House of Commons found time to raise the matter in a debate about children’s media. In February 2008 it became apparent that "Match" would once again face fresh circulation challenges when it was announced that the BBC would be launching Match Of The Day magazine into the weekly football marketplace and "Shoot" declared their intention to return to weekly publication, although this didn't last long as Shoot closed in June 2008. Dragons Den - We appeared on the Christmas 2018 edition of Dragons Den. What is a very rare event, we proudly received offers from all 5 Dragons.