In Like Flint

Over on Comics UK, we love to talk about comics and one of my friends has been enthusing about Battle.  And in his musings about Battle, he added a gentle little barb to goad me into a little more action.  Geoff knows that I am a big Warlord fan and set me the task of talking about Warlord in the way that he has spoken about Battle. His goad was in the way of a suggestion, but for the past few days, my comic brain has thought of little else.

Now, I did read Warlord from issue 1 as a five year old who got fourths after three of his brothers had read the comic and decided to share the wealth, but I had forgotten most of Warlord until I start collecting it again  in the first decade of the 21st Century when Ebay became an easy way of building up collections.  I still had all my annuals (well the first one had been replaced as it had died an honourable death of being read to bits).  A couple of issues stand out in my memory and I will cover them when I get to them, but in the main, I thought that if I can cover every issue of Warlord from issue 1 to issue 627 then I am doing well.  I even spoke about Warlord last year and gave my musings on the fact that it came out in September 1974 which seems like a lifetime ago.

So without further ado, I would like to warn you all that if I have not got anything else going on comic-wise, then I will be reviewing Warlord one issue at a time.  I have already looked at issues 1 to 10 and I know that there are already treats in store for us comic fans.  I also know that I am going to be calling on the help of comics gurus Steve Holland, David Roach and Ray Moore to help me identify the artists that I do not know when they are able to help as they have their own work and articles to deal with.  That reminds me, if you google David Roach and Spanish artists, you will find that David has a gorgeous new book out next year.

Within the first ten issues, you have the amazing talents of Ian Kennedy, Ron Smith, Jim Watson, Jeff Bevan, Carlos Cruz, Keith Shone and Bill Ritchie on display and those are only the ones that I can definitely name. However to give you an idea of one of those artists that I can’t name, here is the example of a page from Code Name Warlord from issue four where I don’t know the artist.  A part of me wants to say Peter Ford, but I can’t say with any amount of certainty

So now you can’t say you haven’t been warned!