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Post by Deleted on May 21, 2019 5:31:50 GMT -5
Out in July, published by Rebellion:  Roy Race is a football player for Melchester Rovers. He debuted in 1954 within the pages of Tiger:  Like superheroes, he aged at his own pace. He got his own comic in 1976:  That title ran until 1995, published by IPC/Fleetway. Spoilers for the 90s ahead. In 1993, Roy was injured in a helicopter crash, resulting in his foot being amputated. His son, Rocky Race, took over. His comic ended in 1993, but was resurrected as a magazine soon after. A monthly, its final issue was published in 1995:  I believe the strip continued in football magazine Match of the Day until the magazine's closure in 2001. Quite a run, eh? As a kid, my pocket money was spent on superhero comics and 2000 AD/ Judge Dredd Megazine. But, occasionally, for a change, I picked up sports comics. So I did read some of the late 80s/early 90s ones. I also did read some classic comics when the Guardian reprinted them around 2009. One had a "Who Shot Roy Race?" storyline, no doubt inspired by Dallas' "Who Shot JR?" One reason I didn't collect football comics regularly was because it could get a bit samey after a while. I think Roy Race was probably kidnapped more than once, and I'm sure I read that he got lost (in the likes of the Outback) more than once after a plane crash or two. His life was very eventful. I was more interested in the non-football exploits. I always felt that sports strips have a "limited shelf life". There's only so many times you can see a footballer/boxer/motorcycle racer bounce back from adversity/stick it to an arrogant rival/have self doubt. But sports comics and sports strips have had a long "shelf life". Another football strip, Striker, began in 1985 in a tabloid. It got its own comic in 2003 (running until 2005) and was resurrected again in recent times. So there's clearly a market for sports strips. I wonder, are sports strips/comics as popular in the United States? Anyway, any thoughts on Roy Race? Or sports strips/comics in general? Post them here! |
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Post by MWGallaher on May 21, 2019 8:12:29 GMT -5
There have been some successful American newspaper strips focused on sports, like Gil Thorp (high school sports, dramatic), Tank McNamara (sports broadcasting, humor), and Joe Palooka (boxing). I can't think of many successful American comic books based on team sports. The most long-running sports comics I know of were Charlton's car-racing (and motorcycle-racing) comics, and the Car-Toons humor magazines and their ilk, which dealt as much with car customizing culture as with racing. The Charltons served a niche market that didn't hold comics to a high bar of quality, but there was some pretty nice work in some of them.
I've been developing an interest in cricket. Have there been any notable cricket comics published in Europe?
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Post by Deleted on May 21, 2019 8:44:04 GMT -5
I can't think of a cricket comic or strip, to be honest.
I did read some comics that had sports strips such as Scorcher and Victor. But nothing cricket-related comes to mind.
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Crimebuster
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Post by Crimebuster on May 21, 2019 9:01:14 GMT -5
Sports strips seem to be popular in Japan, with titles like Prince of Tennis, and Eyeshield 21 (about American football), not to mention lots of manga about baseball and soccer.
Not so much in the U.S. though for some reason. You'd think they would be big, but I can't think of any that have really worked since the Golden Age. I have a real soft spot for DC's sports stuff in the 70's, though - the short-lived Strange Sports Stories revival, and Champion Sports.
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Confessor
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Post by Confessor on May 21, 2019 11:33:24 GMT -5
God, how I loathe Roy of the Rovers. If there's a more crushingly dull comic strip, then I've not encountered it. I absolutely hated football as a kid and I still do. So, unsurprisingly, the merits of a football-themed comic completely escape me. I know it was hugely popular in its day, and that most young British lads want to grow up to be professional footballers, but personally, I always wanted to be a musician, an astronaut, or Han Solo (preferably all three!). Stories about some prat from Melchester Rovers kicking an inflated piece of leather around a field were never gonna do it for me. Still, it was hugely popular -- in fact, along with Dan Dare and Judge Dredd, I'd say that Roy of the Rovers was the only other British comic strip to reach truly iconic status among the general public over here -- so, this reprint will doubtless make money for Rebellion. But personally, I'd rather see more of their Scream! or 2000 AD reprints. I'm much more excited, for example, about Rebellion's recently announced plans to reprint the much loved Trigan Empire strip in its entirety. The first volume is due out next year apparently, and the whole series is to be printed in nicely affordable soft covers. Having read pretty much no Trigan Empire stuff, but heard plenty about how good it is, I'm much more excited about these reprints. Give me gorgeously painted, mythogically-dirived sci-fi tales over crappy old football any day of the week...   |
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Post by codystarbuck on May 21, 2019 22:47:21 GMT -5
Sports comics always fared better in newspaper strips, in the US, where they were aimed at a wider and older audience. However, their glory days were before the growth of television, as it became the main medium for sports. Radio broadcasts were popular; but, sports-themed strips gave you the visuals.
Comics, since they were aimed at kids, always seemed to struggle. Joe Palooka got a pretty decent run and was probably one of the longest sports strip with a regular character. Baseball and football comics never really seemed to last. I suspect part of the problem was that you didn't have too many dramatic stories to tell and there could be a sameness to things. You really had to develop characters and make the reader invest in them, before you could build the drama of the game around them. I suspect it also wasn't helped by the fact that many who went into comics weren't exactly the sporting type. Not everyone was a big outdoorsman, like a Hal Foster. Since so many came from the New York environs, you probably got more baseball than anything.
Britain was always strong for sports comics and the Franco-Belgian publishers had quite a few, including comedies, like Ruggers. I japan, it was a major element of manga, with both fictional and real sporting heroes. There was a boxing strip, Ashita no Joe, which was massively popular. It featured an orphan boy who trains as a boxer and moves up the ranks, eventually becoming champion, with an epic climax to the series. The series was created by Ikki Kajiwara, who then translated the same premise into pro wrestling, with Tiger Mask. Tiger Mask is Naoto Date, an orphan who ran away and joined the Tiger Cave organization, becoming a vicous heel wrestler. An encounter with a young orphan, from the same home, who wants to be a villain, like him, shakes him up. he visits the orphanage and is reunited with an old friend, who now runs the orphanage. He turns face and donates his winnings to the orphanage, angering the Tiger Cave group, who then sends their wrestlers to face him, climaxing in an epic and violent battle with their greatest wrestler.
Tiger Mask had fictional wrestlers; but, also featured real professional wrestlers, like Giant Baba, Antonio Inoki, Freddie Blassie, the Destroyer and Jack Brisco. Inoki's New Japan promotion licensed the character, in the early 80s and created a live version, portrayed by Satoru Sayama, who became a legend in Japan and wrestled in Madison Square Garden, for the WWF. he had innovative and popular bouts with the Dynamite Kid, before leaving New Japan. Since then, four others have portrayed the character, in matches, including Mitsuhara Misawa, Koji Kanemoto, Yoshihiro Yamazaki, and Ikuhisa Minowa. There was also a female version, Tiger Dream, portrayed by Candy Okutsu.
MMA fighter and wrestler Ken Shamrock and the Gracie family have appeared in manga, and baseball, soccer and other sports have long been subjects of manga stories (especially baseball).
In studying international comics, I have read of Roy of the Rovers; but, never really had much interest in seeking it out. I was more interested in things like 2000 AD and Warrior, Dan Dare, Heros the Spartan, Modesty Blaise, Charlie's War, some of the characters who inspired the Albion mini, and a few others. Trigan Empire is a bit more up my alley.
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Post by codystarbuck on May 21, 2019 22:52:29 GMT -5
ps The one thing, outside of newspaper strips, I could cite as a vehicle for popular sports stories was the work of YA author Matt Christopher. He was very successful with a series of stories about baseball, with some football, basketball, and soccer. His books were one of the few things you could get young boys to read, until Harry Potter and some of the more adventurous stuff that followed (like the Percy Jackson series, How To Train Your Dragon, Series of Unfortunate Events, etc). If comics could have found a Matt Christopher, then some publisher might have had a big success with sports comics.
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Post by Deleted on May 21, 2019 23:10:57 GMT -5
I have very few sports comics among those I own, though the few I do own stand out for various reasons. One reminds me of my dad, who was a huge Cowboys fan...  and another contains stories by Will Eisner, one of my favorite creators (I don't have the originals but the Kitchen Sink reprints)...  one features my favorite pro athlete in all of sports...  and others are so ridiculous they are sublime...   and even though there has not been a long running American comics based on sports, I do seek out those whose topics tie together my interests in sports and the comic medium. There have been a few standalone graphic novels done in the US that tell sports stories, and I think these are likely to be more successful in the current market than an attempt at telling an ongoing fictional sports story. Things like Wilfred Santiago's 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente published by Fantagraphics...  Santiago also did a Michael Jordan GN...  or Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow put out by Hyperion Books which won an Eisner...  Sports Illustrated Kids also has a series of sports related GN geared towards young readers, here are a few examples...    so there are a lot more sports focused comics out there in the American market than people think, but they haven't hit the market as ongoing periodicals publications from the main comic publishers. -M |
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Post by Deleted on May 21, 2019 23:21:32 GMT -5
One sports GN I recently picked up, but haven't had a chance to read yet is Jeff Lemire's Roughneck, which focuses on hockey...  sample page...  and another recent one of note was Spinning by Tillie Walden...  which was on many best of the year lists for 2017 and was a spectacular read, a coming of age story of a young queer girl who was involved in competitive ice skating as she grew up. Again, there's a lot of successful sports-themed books out there, just not as serial periodicals as that format does not resonate or sell to the mass market audience in the US any more, and the audience that does buy periodical comics likely has little interest in sports stories these days. -M |
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Post by Deleted on May 22, 2019 3:14:39 GMT -5
For me, sports comics probably work best with an audience turnover every five years.
If there's anyone out there who was able to read "Roy of the Rovers" from 1954 to 1995, well I'd be surprised. I read a few. But they definitely got samey even for me as a semi-regular reader.
"Billy's Boots" was another one. Billy Dane somehow acquired boots belonging to a successful dead football player. The boots allowed him to play in the style of that player (erm, isn't that cheating?). I read a few of those, but it got contrived, hence why audience turnover is probably better. Every now and again, Billy would lose the boots or the boots would be stolen/go missing/etc. That would have got tired quickly had I read the strip regularly.
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Post by Deleted on May 23, 2019 8:18:04 GMT -5
Motor-racing champion Skid Solo was a strip I enjoyed:  |
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Post by Deleted on May 23, 2019 10:45:36 GMT -5
There were loads of other sports-based strips in Brit comics in the 70s, usually all done in 1 or 2 pages per issue. Ones that I remember, include Raven on the Wing  Alf Tupper, Tough of the Track  (pretty much every strip was the same story - Alf versus some posh lads, who he would beat at the last ("I ran 'em!) and then eat a bag of chips on the way home) Lags Eleven and rather more vague recollections of
Bobby of the Blues  and Hot-Shot Hamish All from comics called things like Victor, Valiant, Scorcher, Topper, Beezer etc
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Post by Deleted on May 23, 2019 10:50:33 GMT -5
To be fair, none of the art (or the stories for that matter) were really on the level of the Trigan Empire or Dan Dare
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Post by Prince Hal on May 23, 2019 12:39:42 GMT -5
ps The one thing, outside of newspaper strips, I could cite as a vehicle for popular sports stories was the work of YA author Matt Christopher. He was very successful with a series of stories about baseball, with some football, basketball, and soccer. His books were one of the few things you could get young boys to read, until Harry Potter and some of the more adventurous stuff that followed (like the Percy Jackson series, How To Train Your Dragon, Series of Unfortunate Events, etc). If comics could have found a Matt Christopher, then some publisher might have had a big success with sports comics. I'm far, far too old to have been a reader of Matt Christopher's books, though I'm familiar with his name, but he had a counterpart in the 50s and 60s: Clair Bee and the series of Chip Hilton books. Chip was an excellent athlete, no matter if he was playing baseball, football, or basketball. And Bee, the attributed author, was a well-known and outstanding basketball coach in the 30s and 40s    The books were chock-full of playing tips, inside strategy, and suspenseful (but not always triumphant) nail-biting finishes to games. And they were more than formulaic series entries, as social problems were occasionally woven into the plots without making them seem didactic. |
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Post by beccabear67 on May 23, 2019 12:53:55 GMT -5
I assume you'd have to be interested in the sport to be attracted to reading a sports situation comic. It's just a backdrop in a way for any kind of drama you want about a bunch of people, but it has the bonus of there being a visual element where there are uniforms and logos. Comics are best at something visual and sports are very visual. I pitched an idea for an ice hockey comic book once to an editor but the problem in the U.S./Canada was that 95% or more of professionals from the late '80s onward are all coming from a superhero and maybe barbarian obsession background. Sales are secondary to making sure every known super person or muscled person has it's own title. I would've gotten help with the Hockey comic though from someone who really knew the game better, but fictional teams with good guys and bad guys and trades and girlfriends would've been the meat and potatoes. It's all melodrama and there's nothing wrong with that.
Jaime Hernandez did do a womens wrestling comic for what that's worth, I saw #2 that was part of some package to woo advertisers but wasn't interested myself (was wishing we'd been sent the Gilbert title that started around the same time, we got a Hate and a Big Mouth if I remember correctly).
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