Striker was Pete Nash's long-running strip centring around the adventures of footballer Nick Jarvis and his teammates, first at Thamesford FC and later Warbury FC. It ran in The Sun for 24 years from 1985 (replacing Axa) and subsequently notched up 87 issues of its own comic title (with back-up strips from old IPC titles featuring Billy's Boots and the Kangaroo Kid) before returning to The Sun for a second stint. Cancelled in 2009, it returned for a several month stint in Nuts magazine in 2010, and later resurfaced in The Sun yet again. In September 2018, a second Striker title was launched. Nash finally called time on the Striker saga in June 2019, after the cancellation of the second comic; The Sun were apparently willing to continue running it, but would not pay the amount necessary to make its continued production viable. A one-off special issue was published in July 2019 which ended the ongoing story.
Unusually, Nick Jarvis and Co actually aged in real time, Jarvis starting out as a young hopeful but ending up as a middle-aged club manager. The strip tended to use stereotypes for comedic effect, other characters in its most successful period including bluff northern pork scratchings millionaire Eric Openshaw (the owner of Warbury), vain, arrogant French striker Fabian DeGuisson, militaristic German team captain Kurt Panzer and posh Gerald de Courcey. The principal artist of the strip for much of its run was Simon Ravenhill, though others who contributed included John Cooper. The Daily Mirror's strip Scorer was effectively created as a direct rival for Striker.
When Striker originally left The Sun, it was replaced by a new football strip, The Premier, which began with a news report claiming that a football team clearly intended to be Warbury Warriors had all been killed in a plane crash. The Premier was not a success, and lasted only a comparatively short time before disappearing.
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