A couple of weeks ago friend of the blog John Freeman spotted this lovely piece of art for sale on the Catawiki auction site (here). He identified it as being by artist Sandy James and he wrote a short piece for his amazing Down the Tubes site here about Sandy & about the short-lived Ring Raiders comic that this work was for / from.
So here's where it gets interesting...Ring Raiders only lasted 6 issues in the UK (9 issues in Germany as we saw a couple of weeks ago). Sandy's art appears in all 6 issues - in the strip "Freedom Fight!". There's 3 pages of art per issue so a total of 18 pages of art in total. BUT that story is set in South America 1966 and there are very definitely NO vikings in it.
The Ring Raiders special that was published subsequently has the final 3 pages of the "Freedom Fight!" strip in it. This would have been in issue #7 of Ring Raiders. The final frame of these 3 pages has our heroes flying off into the sunset with the words "...to await our next mission!"
And that mission presumably involved travelling back to good 'ol viking time in issue #8 onwards. Guess we'll never know for sure now!
