25 September 1976 was a VERY important day. The 1^st edition of Roy of the Rovers as a standalone comic was published with an exclusive article by HRH The Duke of Edinburgh in which he exclusively revealed exclusively that in his opinion Britain invented sport!! OK Phil, calm down. Before long comics like this would have very serious competition from self publishers producing fanzines that didn’t really care about HRH exclusives.

Photos, cartoons, caricatures and illustrations all played a huge part in fanzines and fanzine culture. Roy Race himself would be mimicked many times, something we’ll return to in a blog about fanzines and the law. Cartoons were used to get a point over and there was a wide range of success from simple and frankly awful efforts right through to works of genius, it was all there. However for this blog we’ll delve specifically into cartoons and investigate a few artists who would go on to much bigger things.

View From…Pete McKee

During a recent late night “tired and emotional” sojourn on eBay I bid on a job lot of Sheffield Wednesday fanzines. The next day I was reminded of this when I received the dreaded “You Won, pay now”  message. I was reasonably happy, paying £9.80 including postage for what I thought was 5 copies of a fanzine I knew that well known Sheffield artist Pete McKee had provided cartoons for (He features in Spitting Feathers and A View From The East Bank and Out of the Blue.)  A few days later oh how my wife laughed when a huge box turned up with 33 copies of A View From the East Bank (AVFTEB) inside. Long and short of this story is that I’m probably the owner of the world’s largest collection of Pete McKee fanzine art, there are about 10 in every issue.

The many cartoons in AVFTEB included regulars such as the X files spoof, the “W Files” and “Brichards Man Of The People” which might have been about chairman Dave Richards, a man who refused to put up a memorial at Hillsborough to the 96. (admittedly based on legal advice but still..)

McKee started making money from his art by producing T shirts to sell outside Hillsborough commemorating a 5-1 win vs Hull in the first home game of the 1990/91 season when Ron Atkinson first took over. “After that match I went home and produced some ‘What’s it like to be outclassed?’ t-shirts,” he recalled. I hawked them outside the ground for the next two or three games. They sold out, so for that entire season I ended up outside every home game selling those shirts for a fiver a go and then going in to watch the match.” [1]

McKee provided the header for the front cover of AVFTEB for several years. It was reported he was paid a fee of £50 for his artwork.

To this day McKee’s work often covers fans and fandom of both Sheffield clubs, his favourite piece is “One of the first ones was called ‘Full Time’, it was basically a group of Wednesdayites in a pub. For all intents and purposes, it was The Crown because that’s where we used to go, so that was scene-setting, and to really capture what it’s like to be a fan, I think that’s a nice one to go for.” A magnificent summary of what fanzines were and are.

The Genius of Jupitus

Fortune’s Always Hiding was a relatively short lived but well-respected West Ham fanzine which ran for 17 issues from 1989 to 1992. This was a difficult time in the club’s history with fans protesting a bond scheme and terrace favourite Paul Ince appearing in the media in a Manchester United shirt before he was transferred. There was plenty to protest about and issue 15 had a red card included for fans to wave at the board, a gimmick that quite a few fanzines repeated over the years.

The fanzine was also big on humour and cartoons, the cartoons provided by future 6Music broadcaster and performer Phil Jupitus. These included regular features North Bank Norman and Clicka Bacon based on Steve Bacon, club photographer for 30 years.

For some reason some individual copies of this Fanzine are available on eBay £48 with a full set currently listed for £260.72 plus £8 postage. Apparently Issue 15 of this bundle has the red card included but even so, this isn’t a Pete Doherty fanzine we’re talking about here…anyway, I just bought 4 elsewhere for £1.50 each, no more AVFTEB debacles for me.

Squiring up

David Squires has become something of a cult hero for his satirical pieces in the Guardian, now immortalised in 3 superb books. Based on my normal topics I’d guess it won’t surprise you to find out that he started out in a fanzine..

In a 2018 interview[2]he reveals that “The first cartoon I had published was for the Swindon Town fanzine, The 69er, in 1992.” He goes on to describe the thought process we’ve all been through that drove him at the time, the fact that Blackburn were doing this long before Manchester City and Chelsea is a lovely one if you like football trivia. “The cartoon was on the subject of the striker Duncan Shearer, who had just been sold to the newly cashed-up Blackburn. The feeling amongst Swindon fans was that Rovers – a promotion rival – were simply corralling the division’s best players, with no intention of actually using them. This turned out to be true in the case of Shearer, who barely got a game. I sometimes wondered if they signed the wrong Shearer, which would have made a better premise for a cartoon than the one I actually drew, which ended with a destitute Duncan Shearer vomiting in the street. Not exactly subtle, but hey, I was 17 and burning with a sense of injustice.

He also commented in true fanzine fashion “I didn’t ever think I would end up drawing cartoons as a profession. It was just an outlet for me to express the way I felt about the game.”

His brilliant work has all the hallmarks of fanzines, satirical, topical and taking no prisoners. His drawing of Roy Hodgson as an indie kid and musing about his past still have me in stitches every time.

Tidy

Foul fanzine is acknowledged as the first multi club fanzine, and as we reported, it ran from 1972 to 1976 before legal issues forced it to close ( https://footballfanzineculture.blog/2025/08/28/foul-i-fought-the-law-and-the-law-won/ ) Look at the illustration on the cover of a compilation of the fanzine. Familiar? Well incredibly the illustrations and many cartoons for the fanzine were done by Bill Tidy.

Along with many books, TV appearances and a huge amount of charity work I suppose when you had nationally known comic strips like The Cloggies ( 1967 to 1981 in Private Eye), The Fosdyke Saga, (daily in the Daily Mirror from 1971 to 1984) and Grimbledon Down (New Scientist from 1970 until 1994) a mention of your work in Foul might go by the wayside, but I still find it incredible that I can’t find any mention of his work for Foul anywhere online. But it’s there, lots of it.

Not Another One

It didn’t stop there with cartoonists and Foul either, Kevin Macey was a regular contributor before going on to illustrate several books along with a long-standing engagement as sports cartoonist for the Independent newspaper.

His work is still in the best spirit of fanzines and the satire they embraced, still pricking the egos people like Piers Morgan, the pompous wing of the media.

Still crazy..

Tony Husband, who passed away in 2023 was the cartoonist behind one of Britain’s longest running comic strips, The Yobs, a new episode appearing in Private Eye every fortnight for 38 years from 1985 on. The subject matter, the seemingly uninspiring subject of bovver boys with IQs as low as their brows were of course the scourge of football grounds in the 80s, something fanzines sought to end.

That’s not the connection I’m going to finish with here though, instead it’s news that the strong connection between cartoons and fanzines endures to this day. Matthew Kempson is the editor of the relatively new and consistently great fanzine, ‘A View From The Allotment End’ covering life as a North Ferriby fan. Here is his story about this fantastic cover. “Met him at Krankenhausefest after his cartoon confessional. Lovely fella with a top sense of humour, when asked, he kindly did a drawing for our charity zine.”

The Final Whistle

People remember cartoons and illustrations. Roy of the Rovers, Billy the Fish, You are the Ref, Hot Shot Hamish…. see, you can’t remember much about the actual strips but just reading those words your mind recalls the way the characters and strips looked.

Illustrations of various sorts were crucial in fanzines, an eye-catching cover, a point made clear, a much-needed space filler, whatever the reason their use was universal. The names of the artists used in fanzines was rarely known beyond the editorial circle of mates in the pub but as with the writers sometimes, just sometimes the cartoonist would go on to much bigger things and rightly so, because cartoons were a staple and critical element of fanzines.

A cartoon is said to be an art form, typically a drawing or animation, presented in an unrealistic or semi-realistic style…I’d say that covers fanzines as well.

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[1] https://www.thestar.co.uk/sport/football/sheffield-wednesday/whats-it-like-to-be-outclassed-the-sheffield-wednesday-story-of-artist-pete-mckee-2876881

[2] https://thesefootballtimes.co/2018/11/13/david-squires-sheds-light-on-his-unforgettably-hilarious-cartoons-for-the-gallery/