BILLY'S BOOTS - COLLECTED EDITION OF FIRST YEAR'S STRIPS FROM SCORCHER...

Copyright REBELLION

Although I was never a football fan when I was younger (nor am I now), I still bought soccer-themed comics from time-to-time.  That's because, comics for girls aside*, the lure of a new weekly periodical was hard for me to resist.  (*Having said that, I may have bought the occasional ish of LADY PENELOPE.)  So I purchased the early issues of SHOOT!, SCORCHER, and SCORE.  I no longer recall just how long I continued with them (maybe a few weeks or months), but I was certainly in on the ground floor when they first hit the shelves of newsagents all across the nation.

One of the strips I really enjoyed was BILLY'S BOOTS (from Scorcher), and today I received REBELLION's excellent volume of the collected weekly episodes from the first year.  In full-colour as they were originally published, it's great fun to revisit the '70s in my last six months of being a primary school pupil and my first four at secondary (with eight weeks holidays in between the two periods).  Not that you'll be interested in my personal history, but it may prompt you to remember your own if you were around at the time.

When I first read Billy's Boots in the '70s, the impression I had was that 'DEAD-SHOT' KEEN had long departed this mortal vale, so I was surprised to see while browsing through the book that BILLY DANE actually meets him in one of the strips, Keen being very much alive, though retired.  I feel that I'd have remembered that, so it's possible I abandoned Scorcher before ever seeing that particular revelation.  Maybe once I immerse myself in these stories from yesteryear, hitherto dormant memories will resurface, and seemingly forgotten details will become crystal-clear once more - we'll see.

Anyway, if you were a fan of the boy with the magic football boots, this handsome volume (priced at £19.99) is one you should definitely have on your bookshelf, ready to dip into at a moment's notice and thrill again to stories from your youth when you thought you'd be a child forever.  Didn't we all?!

Posted in: Cartoons