Question for any comics historians out there

AlexF · 27 August, 2015, 02:14:25 PM

Barney credits a writer named 'A. Ridgeway' with the last 30-odd episodes of the Mean Arena from way back in the 200s. Does anyone know anything about him/her? Was it a pseudonym for Tom Tully, or Steve Macmanus or someone else?

Tjm86 · 27 August, 2015, 03:54:05 PM

Thrill Power Overload has Tom Tully down as the original writer but not much beyond that. Just the occasional mention amongst other strips running at different times.

maryanddavid · 27 August, 2015, 04:06:38 PM

I'll see if I can find out..

AlexF · 28 August, 2015, 10:53:22 AM

Thank you!

GordonR · 28 August, 2015, 12:09:53 PM

If the plot was 'someone is out to kill the star player or the entire team, and it turns out to be the team owner or manager', then it's definitely Tom Tully.

God bless him, he basically only had the one violent future sport plot in him.

maryanddavid · 28 August, 2015, 01:21:00 PM

He got 30+ years work out of it, he didn't just confine it to future sports! He could tell a story though, his Steel Claw stuff is good fun.

Tjm86 · 28 August, 2015, 07:11:58 PM

Quote from: GordonR on 28 August, 2015, 12:09:53 PM
If the plot was 'someone is out to kill the star player or the entire team, and it turns out to be the team owner or manager', then it's definitely Tom Tully.

God bless him, he basically only had the one violent future sport plot in him.

Was't he responsible for the last Dan Dare story as well? With the cosmic claw and the galactic policeman role. And didn't he regurgitate it again in the Eagle Dan Dare strip when they tried making him over as a galactic policeman?

AlexF · 30 August, 2015, 09:13:34 AM

Yes indeed. And now it's impossible for me not to think of Dan Dare as the 'star player' and the galactic Council as the evil managers who want him dead!

Thanks Gordon!

maryanddavid · 31 August, 2015, 12:03:26 AM

I got this 'can only assume it was a Tully pseudonym'.

I don't have the comics to hand other than taking out a load of boxes, did Tully write any other stories in 2000AD at that time? IPC at the time did not like to see that same writer have multiple credits, hence all the G&W alias's in the Eagle.

AlexF · 07 September, 2015, 12:04:44 PM

Thanks for looking into it!
As far as 2000 AD credits go, at the time Tully had been writing Mean Arena for ages, but no other strips (he may've had some in Battle/Action, Eagle and what have you).

But the credits change from Tom Tully to A. Ridgeway for the last stretch (Progs 251-283). I have an idea that no one was especially enamored of the story at that point, but maybe Tharg had to keep running it because of all those readers who'd won a competition to have their Mean Arena team featured in the strip. So maybe Tully felt he was hacking it out more than usual, and wanted to hide behind some anonymity?

Or maybe the editor at the time had to rewrite the scripts a fair bit to shoehorn in the reader's teams, and so assigned a different script credit.

Aside from my own personal numbers game, this means nothing to anyone and doesn't matter a whit!

Lobo Baggins · 07 September, 2015, 03:02:01 PM

It's an anagram of 'Away - Ed Rig'...

Not that that helps at all...