Ron Embleton’s Wulf the Briton

By John Freeman on 26 February 2010

Over on Blimey! It’s Another Blog About Comics, Lew Stringer notes blog site cloud-109.blogspot.com is showcasing an impressive array of quality artwork including a serialisation of Ron Embleton’s Wulf the Briton from Express Weekly in 1959.

*Express Weekly No. 237, cover dated 4th April 1959, featuring “Wulf the Briton”. Cover scan via Lew Stringer*

“This was simply one of the best adventure strips to have appeared in British comics and the hi-res scans have been cleaned up and presented large size for study,” notes Lew Stringer. “Artist Peter Richardson provides a commentary alongside the strips.”

According to Peter, Wulf the Briton is regarded as Ron Embleton’s comic masterpiece. He took over the strip which was a single page cover feature on Express Weekly in 1957, making it his own and certainly putting it on a par with Dan Dare, which was running in Eagle.

Embleton, who went on to draw strips for TV Century 21 and many other titles, was paid £200 a week for drawing, painting, and lettering the strip, at a time when the average weekly wage in the UK was £12.

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John Freeman

John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.

He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.