Roy of the Rovers accident had resulted in the amputation of his famous left foot, ending his playing career and resulting in his move to Italy as the manager of Serie A side AC Monza (a fictional top-level Italian club, rather than the real club of the same name). Reconciling the continuity of the monthly strip with the stories that preceded and followed it presented difficulties, forcing the story's writers to alter its history in a number of ways, a technique known as retroactive continuity. Significantly, the strip rewrote various parts of Melchester's history, and shortened Roy Sr.'s recorded playing career to a more
Roy of the Rovers (comic) to Nipper, created by the same writer (Tom Tully) and artist (Solano Lopez) and featuring the same club, Blackport Rovers. Buster Madden had been a top-class player for the club, but was killed in a car crash, and reappeared as a ghost to aid his former team-mates on the pitch in a variety of bizarre ways. His cousin Nigel Foster, also a Blackport player, was the only person who could see him (a similar story called "The Footballer Who Wouldn't Stay Dead" had run a decade earlier). United (1992), meanwhile, was one of a handful of strips that only enjoyed