Roy of the Rovers "Best of Roy of the Rovers" books, featuring successive runs of strips from the 1980s and 1970s, were published in June 2008 and 2009 respectively. As of August 2016, Roy of the Rovers and the rest of the Fleetway comics library is owned by Rebellion Developments. The story followed Roy Race, a striker for the fictional football team Melchester Rovers, based in a town of the same name in an unspecified part of England, where Roy lived with his family. In the first episode, a teenaged Roy and his best friend, Blackie Gray, signed for the Rovers after being spotted
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