YESTERDAY'S PAPERS - WARLORD FOR BOYS

Warlord was published by D C Thomson and ran for twelve years between 1974 and 1986 - so successful was the comic that D C Thomson launched another action boy's comic with a similar format, Bullet but although a reasonable success Bullet was eventually merged into Warlord.

Bullet though was something of a sister paper to Warlord and it's main character  was a moustached, multi-talented, highly trained secret agent, aptly named Fireball. When his parents had died in a mysterious car crash when he was a young child, he bewcame the ward of his father's friend Lord Peter Flint, a wartime hero. Fireball had been trained by "Uncle Pete" (since childhood) in the arts of shooting, martial arts, sports and survival - this was as well as the usual reading and writing skills. Mustn't forget the vital reading and writing skills.


Which leads us to Peter Flint Codenamed Warlord who occupied the centre duo-tone pages of Warlord comic. Three was even a Warlord club that readers could join and become Warlord agents.

The Warlord letters page was always a lively affair with Warlord Agents everywhere writing in about their exploits in protecting the homeland from the bad old Nazi spies.

These days D C Thomson is still going strong, but the British comics market is a different place and the only war/adventure titles they currently publish are the excellent Commando Comics Books series but comics such as Warlord have vanished - perhaps forever.


The WIKI entry for the comic reads: 
Warlord included many stories and characters set mainly in World War II and later conflicts like Korea. Though most of them featured heroes from Allied nations such as the UK and the US, there were some series which took the German point of view.

Duo-tone for Peter Flint

They included:

• Union Jack Jackson: a British Royal Marine serving with the Americans.

Nazi menace

• Code-Name Warlord: Lord Peter Flint is the James Bond-like secret agent whose missions take him to various areas of conflict, including Nazi Germany itself. The storyline borrowed "The Scarlet Pimpernel" idea of a seemingly upper class fop actually being a daring wartime agent. Stories would generally start off in the UK with Lord Peter Flint, who hadn't signed up to fight, being accused of cowardice before secretly going off on a mission then returning home. There was a recurring cast of enemies representing various aspects of the Third Reich such as the Gestapo and the SS.

• Killer Kane: Squadron Leader Kane of the RAF during and after the Battle of Britain.

• Kampfgruppe Falken: Major Heinz Falken leads a Dirty Dozen-like group of German soldiers from military penal battalions. Heinz Falken was the Commanding Officer of the battalion. He was an ex-panzer commander that had been sent to the penal battalion for not carrying out war crimes during the Blitzkrieg campaign of 1940. His crime had been that he would not carry out atrocities to please his Nazi Commander at the time.

• Wolverine: French-Canadian Sergeant Revelle leads a mixed crew of Allied soldiers in a M10 Wolverine tank destroyer.

• Iron Annie: the adventures of Kurt Stahlmann of the Luftwaffe and his JU52 transport plane during World War II.

• Kelly's Choppers: Lieutenant Jack Kelly, a USAF helicopter pilot in Korea.

• The Best of Enemies: During the Korean War, British Sergeant Tom Wilson forms a tense alliance with Muller, a German with whom he has old scores to settle.