Roy of the Rovers returns with new comic stories after 17 years away

His is the quintessential British football success story, and there’s no better time for Roy Race to make a comeback to the beautiful game, reckons David Barnett

Comic relief: ‘We’re capturing the romance of football and, really, we’re searching for the soul of the game through Roy’s adventures’ (Illustrations by Rebellion Developments)

It’s FA Cup final day, when two giants of the Premiership – Chelsea and Manchester United – face off for the end-of-season honour.

And not just giants on the scoresheet. According to financial services company Deloitte’s annual Football Money League report, unveiled last month, both clubs are in the top 10, with eighth-placed Chelsea having the financial clout of £367.8m and United topping the table with £581.2m in revenue.

Still, even though the competition is awash with money by the time we get to this point, there’s still the romance of the game to consider, especially in the early fixtures, when teams from the lower echelons get their chance to be giant killers.

The boy Race was lifting trophies long before the days of colour print (Rebellion Developments)

Teams, perhaps, such as Melchester Rovers, home of the finest footballer ever to grace the comic page – Roy Race.

Roy of the Rovers has been an institution for more than 60 years, not just as an evocation of that wistful jumpers-for-goalposts, 11-men-against-11, scuffed-knees vision of the beautiful game, but as a sounding board for the state of British football.

“Roy of the Rovers” debuted in 1954 in the pages of the Tiger comic, featuring teenage football nut Roy Race signing for his beloved Melchester Rovers in the unspecified, but probably northern, town where he lived.

The strip was hugely popular and ran for more than 20 years, until 1976 when Roy was given his own comic, which proved even more of a success. At the height of its popularity, Roy of the Rovers was shifting 450,000 copies a week.

The comic ran until 1993, Roy then shifting to a monthly title. In the interim, he found homes in the pages of the now-defunct Today newspaper, in the footballing magazine Shoot, and the BBC’s own Match of the Day monthly.

It was 2001 when the last “Roy of the Rovers” strip appeared. And what a journey the lad had undergone. From teenage prodigy to manager, eventually buying out his beloved club from its owners the Vitner brothers. On the way, Melchester had won 13 league titles, 11 FA Cups, three League Cups, three European Cups, four European Cup Winners’ Cups and a Uefa Cup. It was job done for the boy Race.

Many a goalkeeper was left helpless by the Melchester star’s thunderous left-foot strikes (Rebellion Developments)

Now, 17 years on, Roy Race is back, thanks to the publishing company Rebellion, who put out the successful science fiction weekly 2000AD, and who have recently taken ownership of a host of long-out-of-print British comic characters.

In real-time, Roy Race would be knocking on 80 and probably have retired to Spain, where he might be running an English-themed pub with chicken-in-the-basket and lashings of lager. But that wouldn’t be too thrilling a concept to draw in a new generation of readers, so Rebellion is going back to basics with a reboot of Roy in both comic and prose form.

The new Roy will be back as a teenager again, longing to play for his local team Melchester Rovers but in the present day rather than the halcyon 1950s era of big shorts and Brylcreemed hair.

The club’s new badge for a new era (Rebellion Developments)

According to Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley, “Roy of the Rovers is an enormously exciting project for us, and we’ve been working hard to ensure that we respect the legacy of this iconic British character. We’ve assembled an incredibly strong team to bring Roy Race back for the 21st century, and I look forward to following Roy’s journey through the always exciting world of modern football.”

On Rebellion’s first team for the reboot are author Tom Palmer, who will be writing the prose adventures of Roy of the Rovers tipped at a Young Adult market, and artist-and-writer team Rob Williams and Ben Willsher, who will be crafting new 56-page graphic novel adventures for a September release, just as the new footy season beds in.

It’s great tactics from the Rebellion boot room to bring in a double-pronged striking formation like this; Palmer has found great success with his children’s series Foul Play and Over The Line, and is a great and hard-working advocate for child literacy.

The novels and the comics will occupy the same universe, interlocking with each other and telling complementary stories, but the two media can still be read independently – though, of course, Rebellion is hoping fans will pick up both.

At its peak the comic sold 450,000 copies a week (Rebellion Developments)

For Williams and Willsher (who actually sound like a striker combination, the new Shearer and Sutton, perhaps), creating new comic book adventures for Roy Race is a dream come true. Willsher, who has drawn strips for 2000AD including “Judge Dredd”, “Strontium Dog” and “Sinister Dexter”, says: “Roy of the Rovers was a big part of my childhood. The annuals stacked up in my bookshelf, and the comics burst out of my cupboards. Growing up I dreamed of helping Roy score goals and lead Melchester to the top… I finally get to do that – result!”

Writer Rob Williams has also written extensively for 2000AD, and also found success in the American comics market. His CV reads like a who’s who of the comics firmament: Batman, Wolverine, Suicide Squad, Superman, Spider-Man, Captain America… and his own hugely inventive title for the mature readers imprint Vertigo, Unfollow.

Roy of the Rovers has always occupied a rather unique space in comics… read by readers who might not consider themselves comics fans, but rather football fans. Williams is one of the people who occupy that relatively small space on the Venn diagram where comics and football cross over… and that’s what helped land him the gig.

“I’m a big football fan and I think they knew that in the Rebellion offices,” says Williams. “When I’m there I always chat to Rebellion’s graphic novels editor Keith Richardson about footy – he’s a QPR fan.”

The king of the comebacks is soon to return in comic and graphic novel form (Rebellion Developments)

So when the subject of the Roy of the Rovers reboot came up, Williams was firmly in the frame. “All those years playing Championship Manager have finally paid off,” he grins. He’s based in Bristol but an Arsenal fan, and has plenty of Roy of the Rovers pedigree, not only being an avid reader as a kid but also owning a coveted Melchester Rovers replica strip.

For Williams, it was important to take the character back to where he began – as a football-mad youngster – but with contemporary sensibilities. Thus we find the young Roy Race given an unexpected leg-up to the first team at Melchester thanks to the driving force behind modern football: money.

He says: “In the new stories, Melchester Rovers are a formerly big club who’ve fallen on hard times. Sort of like a Nottingham Forest club. Their big local rivals are Tynecaster and they’re flying; they’ve got loads of money and have got an incredible new stadium. Melchester are really struggling, and have to sell all their best players to survive, and that’s when they have to promote the youth team players and where Roy gets his big break.”

There are shades of pundit Alan Hansen’s infamous 1995 pronouncement that “you can’t win anything with kids” when Sir Alex Ferguson assembled an incredibly young Manchester United squad… that went on to win both the Premier League and the FA Cup that season.

“That is referenced in the story,” laughs Williams. “We don’t name Alan Hansen, of course, we have someone else say something similar. But Melchester Rovers don’t have much choice. On the one hand Tynecaster are shelling out £180m for some star Brazilian player and Melchester haven’t got a full side.

“But that’s the beauty of the story – everyone likes to root for the underdog. And it’ll all be part of Roy’s journey, starting at the bottom and being thrust into the spotlight. And we’ll also be tackling what happens when young players get fame and fortune, and what can happen to them.”

Images of the new-look Roy Race and his Melchester teammates aren’t being released until next week… and, in true-to-life football style, there’ll also be a strip sponsor unveiled as well.

Rebellion has put together a big-hitting creative team for the reboot (Rebellion Developments)

But although it’s tackling some of the big issues and nodding to the piles of money that create inequalities between clubs, the new Roy of the Rovers will be adhering to the principles that made the strip so popular since its inception in the 1950s.

“If you’re a football fan you’re going to love it,” says Williams. “We’re capturing the romance of football and, really, we’re searching for the soul of the game through Roy’s adventures.”

So whoever wins in the FA Cup final today, be prepared to break out the old yellow and red colours and, this summer, prepare to cheer on Melchester Rovers once again.

* The first ‘Roy of the Rovers’ graphic novel by Rob Williams and Ben Willsher, is released in September. Tom Palmer’s first fiction title will be out in October