Roy of The Rovers - Publication History

Publication History

Roy of the Rovers first appeared on 11 September 1954, as a weekly feature in the comic magazine Tiger, debuting on the front page of the first issue. After 22 years of continued popularity, the strip was judged successful enough to sustain its own weekly comic, the eponymous Roy of the Rovers, launched on 25 September 1976. The comic ran for 853 issues, until 20 March 1993, and included other football strips and features. At the peak of the comic's success about 450,000 copies were sold each week. There were also hardback annuals and holiday specials featuring a mix of reprinted and original content, and for a brief period, starting in 1986, Roy of the Rovers was serialised in the now defunct Today newspaper. These were all-new strips, focusing largely on the relationship between Roy and his wife Penny, rather than the action on the pitch. Between 1988 and 1993, a Best of Roy of the Rovers monthly comic was published, reprinting older stories.

Following the closure of the weekly title in 1993, the strip appeared in a relaunched monthly publication in September that year, with grittier storylines intended to attract teen and young adult fans who had read the weekly comic in their youth. Between January 1994 and January 1995, the monthly strips were mirrored by a weekly edition in Shoot magazine, which had in the late 1980s published a parody called Ray of the Rangers.

The comic strip was resurrected in July 1997, printed as short (usually two-page) features in the BBC's monthly Match of the Day magazine. These strips ran until the magazine's demise in May 2001. By then the strip's wholesome tone, often espousing the virtues of fair play and strong moral character, was beginning to seem old-fashioned. The editor of Roy of the Rovers comic, Barrie Tomlinson, has commented that "everyone seemed to be growing up a bit more quickly, and they wanted stories that were more realistic".

There has been no new material since 2001, but reprints of the strip have appeared online and in print. The Roy of the Rovers website has archived all of the Match of the Day years' material, in addition to excerpts from other classic strips. In October 2007, Setanta bought the original strips, which they featured on their web site.

The present rights holder, Egmont, published a 64-page "collectors edition" of the comic strip in April 2009, gathering together a number of 1980's era Roy of the Rovers stories in addition to other backup strips from the comic. Two Best of Roy of the Rovers books, featuring successive runs of strips from the 1980s and 1970s, were published in June 2008 and 2009 respectively.