I've never done a 'early comics work by writers of the Thundercats cartoon' blog about William Overgard, which is a shocking omission. In my defence, his early comics work consists of:
a) 31 years on the 'Steve Roper' newspaper comic strip, which I have never read but which sounds like it has many wonderful and fascinating similarities to his Thundercats work that I could write about, and
b) A few years drawing comics for Lev Gleason in the fifties, where he's following someone else's script without the opportunity to innovate on his own, and frequently just drawing isolated chapters of a bigger storyline, that would look strange if I just wrote about them alone.
So, obviously, my thought process goes, I need to read the whole history of Steve Roper, right? Individual scans of daily newspapers are available online. And the strip started in 1936 and finished in 2004, so I'd have to read all the pre- and post-Overgard years too, for context...
Maybe I'll have a look at his Lev Gleason credits and see if there's something a bit simpler... ooh, Sniffer and the Deadly Dozen and Iron Jaw...
One long rabbit hole later, there's nothing else for it. I'm going to have to write up the entire history of Sniffer. Most of it's nothing to do with William Overgard at all, so forget the Thundercats angle. I thought I could just do a quick-ish simple summary of the different approaches to the character over the years, but most of it is so good that I can't just skim through it - there's a brief period during the war when it was very dull, but for the most part every single story has funny and interesting things I want to highlight.
So stay tuned for what will have to be a multi-part catalogue of the saga of Sniffer and the Deadly Dozen and Iron Jaw and Crimebuster and Daredevil. Which might take months or years to write in full. And also an article about William Overgard's episodes of Thundercats, because it really isn't fair to exclude him when he started this whole monstrosity!
