Wally Brand : the Ball of Fire

Too much attention has been given to the wrong characters when talking about footballers in comics, fond though I was for a long time of Roy Race.


So I would like to celebrate some of the other characters I remember from my eternal childhood.

Wally Brand

Wally Brand was a centre-forward who first featured in the DC Thomson story papers in the early 1950s. The stories were reprinted at intervals and later (like so many Thomson characters and stories) recycled in illustrated form in the picture-story The Victor or The New Hotspur in the later 1960s, when story papers had gone the way of The Magnet and The Gem.

Brand was naturally a trouble-maker, one of those men who rankled with authority by his "plain-speaking" and won few caps for England because of his "attitude". I believe his nickname, "the ball of fire" also referred to his red hair and the fact he wasn't that tall. Of course, these were the days when the England manager was given a team by his selection committee rather than picking it himself, so Brand doesn't get nearly as many caps as his ability deserves.

I recall one story when Brand finds himself, by various accidents, wearing a bowler hat and carrying a tightly rolled umbrella. He is seen by an England selector, who is so impressed by his smartness that Brand finds himself back in the England team.

In the series "Wanted : Men with two right feet", Brand finds himself as captain of a struggling league side, and trying to rebuild it by bringing in young, untried players. As this is a comic, he spots a winger ("Twisty" Topham, I think) in a spiv, street trader running away from the police; he spots a goalkeeper unloading bricks from a wagon.

But the stories are larded with a particular philospophy of football : "never apologise" (we know you were trying to do your best); "the best way to beat a man is pass the ball".

As always with Thomson, the identity of the authors isn't given. Pity.