The Final Adventure of Captain Winston Bulldog Part Two

In which the character lives on in our hearts and minds...

So, with Bulldog: Empire, as I outlined in part one, I thought I’d said goodbye to this weird little anthropomorphic action-adventure small press comic hero. On the back of Bulldog: Empire, I got what I thought would be my big break in comics writing, adapting Frankenstein, Dracula and An inspector Calls as graphic novels for Classical Comics. It was a great time; I learned a lot about pacing and long-form writing. I like to think that we did the definitive comic book Dracula. And then a few other projects came along, but Bulldog kept pulling me back.

I managed to corral the troops to put out ‘Bulldog Clips’, a wittily-titled one-off collection of short strips where I managed to get a few artists who hadn’t drawn the character before, including the great Andrew Wildman, who provided the cover.

Davey Candlish has published his own small press anthology for many years now, and as I’d folded Bulldog Adventure Magazine, Davey kindly offered to give Bulldog a home in his magazine Paragon (which is fab, by the way). Davey’s reprinted lots of the old Bulldog strips, in many case tarting up the lettering and making a couple of needed edits here and there, and it wasn’t long before he asked me to write some more, most of which was drawn by the much-missed Stephen Prestwood. After Stephen’s passing, I felt a really fun creative partnership had come to an end and I didn’t have the heart to bring back Bulldog for a while, until Davey introduced me to the absolute joy that is the art of Garry Wharton.

Garry has drawn two episodes and is currently drawing the FINAL episode. Yes, it’s not often that in comics there’s a planned ending to anything, but I’m doing it. I created the character of Captain Winston Bulldog, hero of the airwaves and defender of an imagined utopian Britain many decades ago, and now it’s time to finally give him an ending. He began is small press comics and he’s ending the same way, but is it really an ending of everything? I mean, people - and characters - may pass but we can go on and honour them in many ways.

Here’s a sneak peek of the final episode, with art from Garry, coming soon in Paragon!