The Archive's Sunday Comics - Dashing deeds and square jawed heroes

This week's offering is very much of the 1960s --
a quaint and quirky, maybe naive, look behind the
 scenes at crime and adventure series like Danger Man
 and the Saint that were conspicuous on television at
the time, and a source of fascination for young readers.

The story reads as though it could have become the pilot
for a series, but Dave Dawson had only this one adventure,
 appearing in Boys' World Annual 1968. The artwork captures
the laconic spirit of the piece: drawn not quite as a "funny"
 but with the comic, you could say outrageously incredible,
 activities of the narrator and protagonist portrayed to perfection.
 We were unable to find a record of the artist's name, so we turned
to bibliographer and historian Steve Holland, whose Bear Alley blog
[link to http://bearalley.blogspot.com] is a must-visit site for
 British comics fans. Steve told us, "The strip was the work of F.
Solano Lopez's

(pictured below)studio based in Argentina. Lopez was responsible for
a huge number of strips in the UK, his first work appearing in 1960.
Around 1967 he set up a studio to cope with the workload and this strip is
probably one of the earliest jobs the studio did. 

"Lopez's big strip in Argentina was El Eternauta. In the UK his strips
 included Kelly's Eye, Raven on the Wing, Galaxus, Nipper, Adam Eterno,
Janus Stark, and dozens of others. The studio closed in 1974 when IPC
cancelled Lion and Scorcher, but Lopez was still working in the UK
until the early 1990s. He has also drawn series like Ana and The Young
 Witches which are hits in South America and Europe." Wiki says, "In the
 '90s, Solano Lopez produced work in the erotic comics genre, achieving
hits with El Prostíbulo del Terror, from a story by Barreiro, and Silly
Symphony, made for the magazine Kiss Comix." 

 Remember - click on any image

for a larger version.