Year of the Shark Men (1976)

With the issue dated April 24th 1976, D.C. Thomson's adventure weekly anthology The Wizard began a new 12 part serial, Year of the Shark Men. What I hope will be of interest to readers of this blog is that it was illustrated by Dave Gibbons in the early part of his career.

The script, presumably by a staff writer at DC Thomson, is pretty standard boy's adventure material; sinister undersea race threatens mankind with extinction so humans have to fight them to save the world. The main attraction of the strip is Dave's artwork. Even back then we can see that Dave's artistic abilities were flawless and he had a dynamic and clear sequential technique with a strong inking style. I'd say it was certainly the best looking strip in the comic that year.

Here are the first three chapters. Click the pages to see them larger...

As I said above, the series ran for 12 weeks in total. Curiously, with the final two chapters, the inking style seems a little bit different. I wasn't even sure if those parts were by Dave but there's enough about it to convince me it was. Here's the final episode from the issue dated July 10th 1976...

A few months later of course Dave Gibbons would be illustrating Harlem Heroes for the newly launched 2000AD over at IPC, and his career would really start taking off. Today he's deservedly one of the most successful and well known creators in the history of comics, famous as the co-creator of Watchmen, and has become the first comics laureate. Didn't he do well!

Year of the Shark Men was cover featured on four issues of The Wizard during the strip's run but none of them were drawn by Dave. I'm showing the covers here anyway as I'm sure they'll be of interest. The May 22nd cover looks like Ian Kennedy's work to me, and I'm guessing the other three are by Jeff Bevan. (I may be mistaken. Ah if only comics had featured credits back then!)