About The Rover

The Rover

The Rover was a British boys' story paper published by DC Thomson of Dundee from 4 March 1922 to 13 January 1973. It was the second of the celebrated 'Big Five' Thomson story papers, and for half a century it delivered weekly text stories — adventure, sport, school, crime and science fiction, accompanied by illustrations — to generations of British boys. British Comics records a total of 1,855 issues carrying the Rover name across its various combined forms.

Unlike the picture-strip comics that eventually replaced it, The Rover belonged to the story-paper tradition: long prose stories with occasional illustrations, read in weekly instalments. Its most lasting contribution to British popular culture came through characters who began in its text pages and later became famous in comics, above all Alf Tupper, the working-class runner of 'The Tough of the Track', and the air hero Matt Braddock.

The Big Five

In the early 1920s the boys' story-paper market was dominated by the Amalgamated Press, whose Magnet and Gem papers had made Billy Bunter and his contemporaries famous. DC Thomson responded by launching five story papers in little more than a decade. Adventure came first, in September 1921, and was an initial success; Thomson followed it in 1922 with The Rover and The Wizard, then The Skipper in 1930 and The Hotspur in 1933. Together the five became known as the Big Five, sometimes nicknamed the 'tuppenny bloods' after their two-penny price.

The Rover, launched as Adventure's sister paper, was the second of the five. The story papers were required reading for a very large child audience in their glory years — one retrospective account puts the Big Five's readership at a million children — and copies were traded among boys as eagerly as they were bought. Readers read tens of thousands of words a week in the papers, often, as one collector recalled of his own schooldays, under the covers by torchlight when parents disapproved of comics.

Format and Contents

A story paper was an anthology in prose. Each weekly issue mixed illustrated serials and complete stories across many genres — adventure, sports, schooldays, crime and science fiction — together with jokes and features, ensuring, as one archive of the papers puts it, that there was something for every reader in every issue. The mix of a few pages of each serial every week kept readers buying the next number to follow their favourites.

Although the papers were aimed at children and teenagers, they were also consumed by many adults. That breadth mattered during the Second World War, when the Thomson papers did their bit for morale: Adventure's front page of 14 July 1940, for example, carried a portrait of Adolf Hitler leading into a story about how his doom would be sealed. Free gifts, a standard circulation weapon of the story papers, were given with the Big Five from the first Adventure issue of 1921 until the practice stopped during the war and into the early 1950s, a history later traced gift by gift in a 256-page book, Free Gifts in the Big Five, printed by DC Thomson on art paper.

Working-Class Heroes

Wikipedia's summary of The Rover singles out Alf Tupper and Matt Braddock as early examples of the 'working class hero' — a description that captures what distinguished Thomson's story-paper heroes from the public-school protagonists of older boys' fiction. These were heroes readers could identify with: men and boys who worked for a living and succeeded by grit rather than by birth.

The Rover is particularly famous, as the British Comics guide notes, for text stories that later became famous strips in comics such as Hornet, Valiant and Victor. The Thomson story papers were, in that guide's phrase, a rich vein of material to be mined later by the company's comic publications — and The Rover was one of the richest seams of all.

Alf Tupper

Alf Tupper, star of 'The Tough of the Track', started life in text form inside the pages of The Rover, introduced in the 1950s. Alf was a welder who worked in a shop under railway arches — in the Wizard and Rover tradition he is remembered working for Ike Smith for twenty-five shillings a week — and who famously survived on a diet of fish and chips. As a runner he was eternally the underdog, eternally at war with the snobbish, public-school figures who ran athletics and who devised underhand ways of keeping him off the winner's rostrum, and he nearly always came through in the end.

Alf's afterlife far outgrew The Rover. Transferred to picture form, he became for most of four decades the flagship character of The Victor, DC Thomson's main adventure comic, and remained a hero to generations of readers from the 1950s until The Victor's demise in the 1990s. A collected volume, The Best of Alf Tupper, was published in 2012, edited by Morris Heggie, a Thomson editor of nearly forty years' standing who had himself begun as a trainee sub-editor on The Rover, in an office next door but one to The Victor's team. Few story-paper characters can have had a longer or warmer career.

Matt Braddock and Morgyn the Mighty

Matt Braddock was The Rover's other signature working-class hero, an airman whose exploits in its pages made him one of the paper's best-known names. Like Alf Tupper, Braddock had a substantial second career in picture form: when DC Thomson launched the war comic Warlord in 1974, its first issue included Bomber Braddock, a retelling of a character who had originally appeared in The Rover — one of several cases of Warlord drawing directly on the story-paper tradition it otherwise sought to sweep away.

The Rover also carried Morgyn the Mighty, a strongman hero whose name recurred across Thomson titles for decades, and football heroes of its own. The paper's sporting fiction included Nick Smith, a former circus daredevil who began his football career in The Rover in 1945. Football, athletics, flying and adventure formed the core of the paper's appeal, delivered week after week in prose serials that asked more sustained reading of their young audience than any picture comic would.

The Merger Years

By the 1960s the story-paper market was shrinking as picture comics took over, and Thomson consolidated its titles into The Rover in turn. Adventure, the first of the Big Five, merged into it on 21 January 1961, and the combined paper appeared as Rover and Adventure. That combined title ran for 142 issues before the Adventure name was dropped in October 1963.

The Wizard followed almost immediately: it merged with The Rover in the autumn of 1963, the last original Wizard issue being dated 16 November 1963, and the combined Rover and Wizard continued from 23 November 1963. The Wizard name was finally dropped in August 1969 and the paper was renamed The Rover once more. In a reversal of fortune, when The Wizard was relaunched as a picture comic in 1970 it was the revived Wizard that eventually incorporated The Rover in 1973.

The End in 1973

The Rover finally ceased publication with the issue dated 13 January 1973, a little over fifty years after its launch and after 1,855 issues bearing its name in one form or another. The numbering of its final years reflects its complicated combined history rather than a single unbroken sequence, which is why catalogues record its closing run under a much lower issue number than its cumulative total.

Its end marked the effective close of the classic Thomson story-paper era. The Dandy and The Beano, launched in the late 1930s as picture comics, had shown the future; prose story papers survived longest where, as in The Rover, they had absorbed their stablemates and kept a loyal readership for serial fiction. The characters, however, did not die with the paper: Alf Tupper ran on in The Victor for two more decades, and Braddock flew again in Warlord.

Legacy

The Rover's legacy is twofold. As a reading experience, it belonged to a generation of British boys for whom weekly prose serials were a central pleasure — papers remembered by collectors and scholars alike for the sheer volume of reading they delivered, and now studied as a distinct class of British publishing, neither American pulp nor pocket library, but an anthology form of its own. As a creative nursery, it originated or nurtured heroes who became central to DC Thomson's post-war comics, demonstrating how the Dundee firm's story papers seeded its picture-comic empire.

Collected reprints, reference guides such as the British Comics site, and scholarly and nostalgic writing about the Big Five keep The Rover's name alive. For historians of British children's publishing, its fifty-one-year run — from the aftermath of the First World War to the age of colour television — makes it one of the clearest through-lines in the whole story of the British boys' paper.