Football's Comic Book Heroes

Product Information

Your login may only be used by one person – a single login shared by multiple people is not permitted. IPC Magazines, the publishers of Scorcher, always referred to it as a "paper" rather than a comic in its editorials, to distinguish it from more child-oriented publications such as The Beano or The Dandy. In addition to its realistic and comedic football-themed stories, it contained factual items about British professional football, and advertisements not only for contemporary toys, games and confectionery, but also others aimed at an older readership, such as for the Charles Atlas body building method, and recruitment advertisements for the Police, the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy.

The interest, the press… we’ve been doing tie-ins with sponsors, and everybody loves it. It’s proper, mainstream British culture. You only have to think of the World Cup and the way Harry Kane’s goal-scoring was constantly being referred to. Sometimes Roy of the Rovers seems like a prism that we see football through. 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? 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. Lags Eleven: (Humorous) Willie Smith, known to his friends as "Brilliant Genius", was the greatest super-crook in Britain, having been the mastermind behind numerous bank-raids, jewel-robberies and wage-snatches. Unfortunately for him he'd been caught and was doing a ten-year stretch in Bankhurst Prison, where he decides to start a football team as part of a master plan to escape during the first away match.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. 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. In the Fifties, they would have just ignored hooliganism, for sure. I felt we should reflect real life, and if you wanted to reflect real life, you had to take in hooliganism. So, we felt we should try to lead the way and talk to people about how they should behave, hopefully making a contribution."

hitting war comic Battle, had been charged with another new, gritty, modern adventure title. Action, which debuted in February 1976, was violent, anarchic and exciting, with popular strips including Hook Jaw (about a huge, marauding Jaws-like great white shark), Kids Rule OK (gangs of feral children in a post-apocalyptic London) and Tom Tully’s Look Out for Lefty, the story of hot-headed, yobbish striker Kenny 'Lefty' Lampton, his repulsive, Steptoe-ish granddad and tough, impetuous and loyal skinhead girlfriend Ange. Scorcher Team of the Week: a different schoolboy team featured each week has their team photograph published and wins a Scorcher football. He is the wholesome Roy of the Rovers, golf-loving, family-man type," mooned the Daily Mail in agreement, "unlikely to risk it all on red at the roulette table in Monte Carlo."In 1978 DC published a special in which their boy Superman took on the greatest boxer of all time in the ring. Written by Dennis O’Neil and drawn by Neal Adams, it was a special treasury edition that never made it to any newsagents I frequented as a kid. But there was an ad for it in every DC comic I read and the cover was enough in itself to make me salivate. Scorcher Comic was launched by IPC on 10th January 1970 inspired by the success of football magazines like 'Goal' and 'Shoot'. Scorcher was a departure in that all the content was entirely football based. Strips included "Bobby of the Blues","Paxton's Powerhouse","Lag's Eleven","Billy's Boots" and "Kangaroo Kid".