Roy of the Rovers Monthly

Roy scores in the European Cup Final!

Back in 1993 I landed the job as artist on the relaunch of British comic icon Roy of the Rovers. Fleetway had given Stuart Green, the editor and writer, a green light to reinvent the strip and he asked me to provide the artwork. Previously Stuart and I had worked together on the ill-fated Glory Glory for Tundra UK and after its demise both of us had been kicking our heels wondering what to do next.

Cover to the sample issue 1 - the main image is by me, the smaller images are by Sean Longcroft and Warren Pleece.

Glory Glory was a fortnightly football anthology comic intended for the newstands. It combined gritty realism, surreal comedy and stylish football action. It was the brainchild of Stuart and Frank Plowright.

Stuart's plan was to bring the same sensibilities to Roy of the Rovers. His ideas were brilliant but ruthless. The original title had been cancelled in March 1993 and the story of Roy Race ended with Roy crashing his private helicopter, readers were left not knowing if he was alive or dead. In September of the same year our Monthly comic started up and Roy awoke from a coma to find that his comic strip world had gone and reality had moved in. The first shock was discovering that he had lost his famous left foot, amputated after the crash.

A very different iconic image of Roy Race, not your standard front cover image for a football comic. caused a bit of a stir with criticism from some disabled groups and a TV show even linking the image to a history of comics portraying people in wheel chairs as failures or evil vengeful monsters. We were simply trying to show Roy's true innate heroism in the way he overcomes the 'worst thing that could have happened'.

The second shock was to discover that the new Roy of the Rovers was 'Delroy' of the Rovers, a ragamuffin who plays for Nigeria.

"Delroy of the Rovers" ran the headline in the tabloid newspapers at the time.

The comic strip was very committed to the Kick Racism Out of Football Campaign and I designed posters for the campaign featuring Delroy and Rocky. The strip itself never shied away from dealing with issues of racism in the game

Third shock was to discover that his son, Rocky, has turned into a cocky little brat (this shock happens to most parents of course). Rocky is also in the Melchester team now, but it turns out he's not exactly a chip off the old block. He doesn't seem to be anywhere near as good as his dad was, he's grumpy, opinionated, self centred and ends up in fights, walking out of the club and even taking ecstasy. A whole new meaning to Racey's rocket.

As you can see from these pages, which show Rocky wondering around Melchester Rec in solipsistic mode, the story telling is often concerned as much with a face in the a Melchester Rovers' crowd or 'off the field' affairs as it is with the action on the pitch (a relegation battle of course!).

Rocky's attempts to escape football prove fruitless as he finds himself watching a kids game and standing next to a life long Rovers' fan

Contrasting the northern skies ("through the wind and the rain") with the shared warmth of the football crowd and the sunshine of cup success and the open top bus.

The top image shows the end of 'Grandad' Roy's career with a knee injury. (see below)

Much of what we did was disregarded by later revamps of the strip. Stuart wanted to be able to write about the history of Roy, but it was so ridiculous it undermined the whole sense of realism he was aiming for (for example Roy had been playing in the top flight for 40 years!). Some retconning was required. Roy's career was split in two and the early years were attributed to Roy's father. So we had a Roy Race dynasty.

Three generations of Race - Grandfather, Father and son. This was a cover image featuring a cigarette card, bubble gum card and Panini sticker for each generation.

I tried to give each one an 'era' face - a fifties face a seventies face and a nineties face

Grandad Roy - a reinterpretation of the Joe Colquhoun era, again I'm most proud of how fifties he looks - footballers don't look like this anymore. I don't just mean the kit I mean the man himself.

Amusing bit of retcon here - Thanks to Roy Race England qualify for the 1978 World Cup

Flashbacks were a regular storytelling device in the monthly and I relished switching between eras often using different materials to depict a different time. This oil pastel and pencil stuff was for the dark theaters inside the old man's head - the only place for replaying games from a time before TV.

'Grandad' Roy in action as remembered by the ol' fella in the park

I went a bit over the top with some of seventies flashback scenes. Hand painting seventies designs as panel borders with gouache was never a good idea. And there's some dodgy drawing going on here...

An early experiment with flashbacks from issue 1

Another twist was having Melchester Rovers playing real teams with real players (albeit with the names changed). Here's Rocky battling with Bryan Figgs (okay, I made that one up! You get the idea).

Another cover image

The strip also ran simultaneously in Shoot magazine as a two page spread every week (Shoot was selling 120,000 a week in those days, hard to believe now). I took on the drawing duties there and the monthly strip alternated between artists. After a couple of years Fleetway had had enough of our antics and pulled the plug.

A strip from Shoot - this is a reserve game with Rocky's arch rival, Johnny Dexter encouraging Rocky's eventual replacement to impress

Another Shoot strip - this one features real Liverpool players. (Colours by Geraint Ford)

I never had any intention or ambition to draw football comics, but I'm glad I did it. Prior to Glory Glory I had been producing the psychedelic small press comic SLANG* with Sean Longcroft. Essentially I went from doing this:

Psychederek goes down to sign on

To this:

The Melchester defence is unhinged by Keegan's Newcastle

I'm quite proud of what Stuart and I did with Roy of the Rovers**, there's been nothing quite like it before or since, although it may have been more appreciated if it had been football comics in general rather than one of the great icons of British comics that we were so gleefully deconstructing.

*I'll put together another monster blog about SLANG comic at some point...

**Other artists who worked on the strip included Sean Longcroft, Gerraint Ford, Gary Marshall and David Jukes.