A problem that illustrator Bob Bond sometimes faced when creating his Star Strip series was finding enough incidents of dramatic interest to fill a page. A successful career was not the same thing as an interesting career after all: many of the big name players of the day were worthy, if a little dull.

This 1964 edition featuring the life and times of one of England’s greatest strikers suffers a similar problem for slightly different reasons. Whichever team Jimmy Greaves was playing for or against hardly mattered as any combination still usually resulted in a cascade of goals for this striking juggernaut. The consequence here is that virtually every frame is compelled to inform us of yet another Greaves goalscoring feat, landmark or record. It’s a perfectly accurate rendering of the highlights of the striker’s career to that point, but it does read as something of a one-track story.

There are other joys to be found though. While it’s common for Bond to use his protagonist to advance the story in breaking the fourth wall style, Greaves is drawn delivering his monologue (third row, middle) looking down at the ground and off to the side. It has the probably unintentional effect of conveying him as sad or sulky. Or maybe a little coquettish, the tease.

Bond’s crowd exclamations are always great fun too with the scoring feats of a young Greaves causing a fan to involuntarily exclaim ‘Snakes Alive!’ BTLM would love to see this term become popular football parlance on Match of the Day: “Snakes alive Gary, that Crystal Palace v Fulham game was a bundle of laughs.”