Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. He soon became a star, leading the team to either the Football League title or a cup almost every season. Nonetheless, loyal readers would usually suspend disbelief, a characteristic later parodied by Viz magazine's Billy the Fish, a fish with a human head who plays in goal for Fulchester United.

It is this as much as anything that has ensured the iconic comic book character's continuing popularity, almost 67 years after he first appeared on the pages of Tiger magazine.There has also been more football specific memorabilia as well including Subbuteo extensions (released in the 1980s, the first two only available through the comic), board games, computer games, figurines, football boots and football shirts. Roy of the Rovers is a British comic strip about the life and times of a fictional footballer and later manager named Roy Race, who played for Melchester Rovers. A Roy of the Rovers computer game was released, on the Commodore 64, [70] Amstrad CPC [71] and ZX Spectrum [72] in 1988.

Rocky rejoined Melchester, and the club was promoted back into the Premier League at the end of the year.

Roy: The Official Autobiography of Roy of the Rovers was then reprinted in paperback by Arrow in 2015 (ISBN 978-0-09-959866-4).

When Pepper dropped out after four instalments due to the demands of an unwieldy workload, Colquhoun assumed the writing duties, assisted by Tiger‘s editorial staff on the technical aspects of the game, admitting that he knew “damn all about soccer”. It was relaunched as a monthly later in the year, with Roy Race junior, aka "Rocky", as the new hero, drawn by a variety of artists, including David Jukes, Sean Longcroft, Garry Marshall and Simon Fraser, but was cancelled in 1995.

It was split into two parts: the first an adventure game, in which– taking the role of Roy Race– the player had to find and rescue the kidnapped Melchester team, before then playing the second part, which consisted of a charity match to raise funds for the club. The strip first appeared in the Tiger in 1954, before giving its name to a weekly (and later monthly) comic, published by IPC and Fleetway from 1976 until 1995, in which it was the main feature. The game received mixed reactions; the Spectrum version received 7/10 from Your Sinclair, but only 3/10 from Sinclair User. Barrie Tomlinson’s recently -released Real Roy of the Rovers Stuff, telling the real-world story behind the creation of the football legend, complements this rather nicely.

The character went onto fulfil every schoolboy’s fantasy, captaining Rovers to the game’s top honours and playing for England before graduating into management, both with Melchester and Italian side AC Monza. Pre-season visits to fictional South American republics like Parador generally saw them embroiled in off-pitch intrigue.Published in 2014 by Century this is “the greatest story ever told by the world’s most beloved sportsman, Roy of the Rovers, in his own words for the first time. As the average reader probably stayed with the comic for only three or four years, many storylines were recycled. The editor of Roy of the Rovers comic, Barrie Tomlinson, has commented that "everyone seemed to be growing up a bit more quickly, and they wanted stories that were more realistic". Almost every year, the club was either competing for the major honours at the top of the domestic and European game, or struggling against relegation to lower divisions.