not the eagle, not 2000AD

in 1973-ish, when i wz 13 and my sister was 11, alwyn - who was 12, and lived on the farm we used to stay at on summer holiday in wales - gave us a big pile of comics he wz clearing out: probably about 30 in all, recent issues of IPC's Lion and Thunder (haha great combo) and Valiant (and TV21) Looking through the handful I still have - as some of you may have guessed, I have been clearing out cupboards at my parents' house while my mum has been ill - I got fascinated by the intermediate world they represent, 2000AD (with its very coherent attitude and self-aware quality) not yet born; Eagle, mid-60s Bellamy-buoyed confidence all gone, on one of its many hiatuses; the purulent underfelt of D. C. Thomson war-comics clumsily aware that WW2 wz far off now and no longer had an automatic lock...

L&T and V&TV21 are a fairly shoddy opportunistic mix: cover-stories are look-and-learn-ish "fact-oid" panels; a lot of the art is incompetent; a lot of the stories very obvious imitations or feeble stabs at novelty: "the spellbinder" = a catweazle rip, for example; or "starts today! a hilarious new crime-busting adventure with... Yellowknife of the Yard. Yellowknife, son of a sioux chief, was Scotland Yard's strangest detective..."; or (actually at the time my sister and my favourite, "war of the white eyes", where a cloud of gas is turning all, man and beast, into superstrong homicidal killing machines (with all-white eyes) --- we liked bcz even at that age we knew that it wz abominably badly drawn, and that this line, issuing from a bad picture of a jetplane, "aaargh! bees! millions of bees! and look! their eyes are all white!", wz very silly

but not all of them are awful: stories drawn by one particular artist really sprang out - though of course no mention is made of his name: broodingly dark, skies AND faces hatched, when the right gothic moment brews, by thick furrows and patches --- a very memorable style, at least in the sense that (unlike the spellbinder or yellowknife), i remembered reading these stories at the time, and indeed remember images from issues that haven't survived

the stories are these
"adam eterno": abt a guy who can't be killed - except by a weapon made of gold - who hurtles through time helping ppl he doesn't know
"kelly's eye": tim kelly owns the eye of zoltec (which protects him from all harm when he wears it); he is travelling through time (only i forget why)
"janus stark"; a victorian crimebusting escapologist and inda-rubber-man!
"raven on the wing": gypsy foopballer who plays in bare feet

ok so i googled and discovered that (as probably some of you know?), the artist was indeed fairly special: Francisco Solano Lopez, an argentinian later famous for ahem erotic comix like the young witches --- he contributed a bit to early 2000AD, then stopped (why? falklands collateral? or IPC didn't pay enough when he had erotic comics to write w.his son?)