I love watching football, being hooked since first going to the Arsenal in 1960. We finally had to give up our season tickets in 2001 as by then we were living far enough away from Highbury to make the match tickets plus train fares just too expensive.
It was around that period that we started to move house quite often and we would always go to watch our various local teams – Huddersfield Town, Kettering Town, Brighton and Hove Albion, Crawley Town – so you could say that it has been a major interest in my life. But, apart from copying a few photographs out of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly when I was around nine or ten, I have never had the slightest interest in drawing a football comic. And I have very rarely even read a football comic.
So when Stuart Green asked me to do a four page strip for the monthly Roy of the Rovers comic in 1994 it was a recipe for disaster. I should have said no but I was in my geometric phase and not getting much work. Stuart wanted me to make the strip ‘a bit more realistic’ and, in all good faith, I said I would. And, indeed, I did do my best to try and make it a bit more realistic.
I shall carry the guilt to my grave…
23 January 2012 at 13:40
Aww! It’s great stuff.
I love the use of watercolour and I love your geometric phase artwork.
I can even forgive you for being a Gooner ;)
Did it get published in the end?
23 January 2012 at 13:58
It was published in Roy of the Rovers Monthly #18 February 1995. I just got that out of the Grand Comics Database, a remarkable enterprise.
23 January 2012 at 13:55
I had a few pages in that issue. I was trying my best to make it look like Rob Davis, who was doing his best to look like you.
I have to say that I was VERY chuffed to have work in the same comic as you. I felt very bigtime indeed. :-D
23 January 2012 at 13:59
And I was doing my best to look like anything BUT me.
24 January 2012 at 00:05
That is really awesome !!!!
24 January 2012 at 06:50
I can’t believe it. To think I might have passed you in the street without realising it, stings!! I was living on Highbury Lane opposite the old stadium in ’95-96. We were there when they filmed Feverpitch. Did you live nearby?
I was/ am not a fan, but would have gladly handed over the cash for a copy of R of R if I had been aware that you had work in it. It looks better to me than the usual offerings.
2 February 2012 at 23:59
As always, just wonderful stuff Mr McMahon !