SCORE 'n' ROAR No.1 (1970)

With their first new boys' adventure comic Scorcher having been established for several months, IPC launched another football weekly on Saturday 12th September 1970. Score 'n' Roar used the same gimmick that IPC's Whizzer and Chips had pioneered a year earlier; two 'rival' comics in one. 16 page Roar was inside 16 page Score and could be separated by opening up the staples.

Kicking off the new comic the first strip was Jack of United, superbly drawn by Barrie Mitchell. A fairly standard football strip about two rival brothers but the interesting thing was that the plot concerning Jack's brother Jimmy continued into his own strip, Jimmy of City, in Roar.

Unlike Scorcher's newsprint format, Score 'n' Roar had the benefit of expensive photogravure printing. This enabled an excellent reproduction of photographs and the comic took full advantage of this by including several feature pages. Score had its opinion page written by 'The Captain'. I'm presuming the chap in the photo may be the comic's editor Dave Hunt. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

Cannonball Craig was somewhat like Scorcher's Billy's Boots in that its star was a youngster who was useless at football until aided by artificial means. In Billy's case it was his magic boots, and in Craig's case it was... wait for it... nuclear irradiated bubble-and-squeak! The artwork on this first chapter is by Mike Western, but Mike White drew later episodes.

Here's how Roar was bound into the centre of Score...

Roar's first strip was the aforementioned Jimmy of City by Barrie Mitchell, continued from Jack of United in Score...

Roar had its own opinion page headed by 'The Inside Man'. I'm pretty sure that the photo is of Bob Paynter, group editor of IPC's humour comics. He was a bit greyer when I knew him but that was 14 years later. I doubt Bob actually wrote the column but comics often used photos of staff members in this way. 

The great Tom Kerr was on board, illustrating the two page Peter the Cat strip. The name was inspired by real-life goalkeeper Peter Bonetti who was nicknamed 'The Cat', but the strip is not about him. 

The centre pages featured Mark Your Man, an Agatha Christie style mystery involving a process of elimination of the suspects. Art on episode one by Geoff Campion, but John Catchpole drew later episodes...

A supernatural three-pager next, with Phantom of the Forest about a ghost footballer. Art by Eric Bradbury, but Jesus Blasco drew later episodes. (I'm guessing that so many of the strips soon lost their original artists because the first episodes would have been produced many months earlier for the dummy issue and perhaps they couldn't fit the extra workload in regularly.)

The Mudlarks next, with art by Ted Kearon.

Back to the second half of Score for the next strip, and the one that was destined to become the most popular and enduring. Here's the very first episode of Nipper, illustrated by the Solano Lopez studio giving it a bleak, grimy look befitting the setting of the fictional industrial town it was set in. Nipper was actually written more like a story from a girls' comic, with an aspect of pathos and the underdog's struggle against his situation. He even had a cruel guardian. Clearly this touched a chord with readers and the strip survived for many years, transferring to Scorcher, and later Tiger, when the comics merged. I don't know who the writer was on these early Nipper strips but Nat Munger is a great name for a bad guy!  

After the grim despair of Nipper, the comic lightened things up for its last strip with Lord Rumsey's Rovers, a comedy drama drawn by Douglas Maxted (although another artist soon took over in subsequent weeks).

Overall, I felt that Score 'n' Roar was a better comic than Scorcher. Its stories seemed stronger and the better paper enabled good photo features. It soon added a humour strip, Trouble Shooter by Graham Allen, and you can see an example of that on a post I did seven years ago (click here). Sadly the comic didn't survive for long. Its paper quality declined and merged with itself in 1971, dropping the Roar part of the title, and then Score merged into Scorcher with the issue dated 3rd July 1971. 

New Year SMASH! (1969)

Here's the cover to the New Year edition of Smash! dated 4th January 1969, so it'd go on sale on the 28th December 1968. The popular Swots and the Blots were the regular cover strip by this time, drawn by Mike Lacey. The strip continued over the page...

Not many of the strips were actually celebrating New Year. Some of the humour strips just seemed be be using the cold weather as a plot. However, Bad Penny combined references to the New Year as well as a plot involving snow. "Jumping jellybabies! It's 1969!" Artwork by the ever-brilliant Leo Baxendale...

The Cloak began a new adventure that week. No Hogmanay reference as such, but it did feature a Scottish villain, - The Phantom Piper! It also contained the return of the stunning Lady Shady who became a regular member of The Cloak's team. Creator Mike Higgs also introduced The Cloakster in this episode, giving us males an excuse that we were only buying it for the car articles and not to gawp at Lady Shady's cleavage. 

Smash! had a good mixture of content in those days. Sadly it was the last man standing as regards the five 'Power Comics' and the recent merger with Fantastic had brought in reprints of Marvel's Thor by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby...

...along with reprints of Lee and Kirby's The Fantastic Four, which had arrived via a merger with Pow! As you can see, the panels had been rearranged and edited from the original American format to fit approximately two US pages onto one of Smash's large pages.

With this being Smash! it also featured Batman of course, reprinting the American newspaper strips of the time.

A few home-grown adventure strips were also in the comic, including Brian's Brain, drawn by Barrie Mitchell...

Ken Reid was getting into the swing of his run on The Nervs with this excellent two pager. For me, these strips represent Ken at his greatest.

On the back page, Sammy Shrink in a post-Christmas story about a late present. Nice clear storytelling by Terry Bave, who would soon become very prolific when IPC launched their own humour comics.

As you may have noticed from the indicia on page 2, IPC Magazines were now in charge of Smash! instead of Odhams. Sadly, a few weeks later, they'd make their presence felt and they'd transform the comic into an unrecognisable form as a traditional boy's adventure weekly. As readers at the time we didn't know that of course, enjoying The Cloak, The Nervs, Batman, and the Marvel reprints, unaware that they'd soon be gone from the comic forever. The sixties were definitely ending. 

...but 2015 is about to begin! My thanks to you all for following this blog over the past 12 months and may I wish you a Happy New Year and hope that you continue to read (and comment) for as long as it lasts. We can never predict what a new year will bring us but we can only hope for happiness, good health, and prosperity. Here's all the best for 2015!