Roy of the Rovers
| Roy of the Rovers | |
|---|---|
A Roy of the Rovers annual, featuring Roy Race (centre) lifting the FA Cup
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| Created by | Frank S. Pepper |
| Publication information | |
| Publisher |
Fleetway IPC |
| Schedule | Weekly |
| Formats | Original material for the series has been published as a strip in the comics anthology(s) Tiger and a set of ongoing series. |
| Genre |
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| Publication date | September 1954 |
| Main character(s) | Roy Race |
| Creative team | |
| Writer(s) |
Frank S. Pepper Joe Colquhoun Derek Birnage Tom Tully Ian Rimmer Stuart Green |
| Artist(s) |
Joe Colquhoun Paul Trevillion Yvonne Hutton David Sque Mike White Barrie Mitchell David Jukes Sean Longcroft Garry Marshall |
| Creator(s) | Frank S. Pepper |
| Editor(s) | Barrie Tomlinson Ian Vosper David Hunt |
| Reprints | |
| Collected editions | |
| The Best of Roy of the Rovers: The 1980s | |
| The Best of Roy of the Rovers: The 1970s | |
| The Bumper Book of Roy of the Rovers | |
Roy of the Rovers is a British comic strip about the life and times of a fictional footballer named Roy Race, who played for Melchester Rovers. The strip first appeared in the Tiger in 1954, before giving its name to a weekly (and later monthly) comic magazine, published by IPC and Fleetway from 1976 until 1995, in which it was the main feature.
The weekly strip ran until 1993, following Roy's playing career until its conclusion after he lost his left foot in a helicopter crash. When the monthly comic was launched later that year the focus switched to Roy's son Rocky, who also played for Melchester. This publication was short-lived, and folded after only 19 issues. The adventures of the Race family were subsequently featured in the monthly Match of the Day football magazine, in which father and son were reunited as manager and player respectively. These strips began in 1997 and continued until the magazine's closure in May 2001.
Football-themed stories were a staple of British comics for boys from the 1950s onwards, and Roy of the Rovers was the most popular. To keep the strip exciting, Melchester was almost every year either competing for major honours or struggling against relegation to a lower division; a normal, uneventful season of mid-table mediocrity was unknown at Melchester Rovers. The strip followed the structure of the actual English football season, thus there were several months each year in summer when there was no league football. By far the most common summer storyline saw Melchester touring a fictional country in an exotic part of the world, often South America, where they would invariably be kidnapped and held to ransom. The average reader probably stayed with the comic regularly for only three or four years, therefore storylines were sometimes recycled; during the first ten years of his playing career, Roy was kidnapped at least four times. Roy also made numerous appearances for England, depicted playing alongside actual players such as Malcolm Macdonald and Trevor Francis.
The stock media phrase "real 'Roy of the Rovers' stuff" is often used by football writers, commentators and fans when describing displays of great skill, or surprising results that go against the odds, in reference to the dramatic storylines that were the strip's trademark.
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