Colonel Sir Harold Wilberforce Clifton is a comics character. He is a British colonel, retired from MI6, and sometimes still active for the British government. Also as amateur sleuth, his flegmatic approach to stress leads to humorous situations.
Harold Clifton lives in Puddington, near London, supported by housekeeper Mrs Partridge, who does an price-winning gulash. Clifton drives a red MG TD from the early fifties, which gets mangled in most stories, but is repaired at all costs. Clifton's hobbies include boy scouting (he's boy scout master Singing Heron), cats, and collecting cigar wraps. He received a Knighthood in 1993 for his saving of a member of the Royal family.
Over the fifty years of publications of Clifton comics books, approximately 20 full books and 20 smaller stories have been published, totalling about 800 pages. A succession of cartoonist and scenarists have been creating the Clifton character.
Cartoonists
The original cartoonist was Raymond Macherot, who created the Colonel Clifton character in 1959 and the early sixties. In preliminary studies, Macherot used Colonel Horatio Amaory Crickett as a working name, but before the first story decided on Colonel Clifton instead. Only in the second story, Clifton's first names Harold Wilberforce were introduced. After three stories, Macherot focused on another character, and it was quiet for Clifton for some years.
At the end of the sixties Jo-El Azara and Greg did one story, and during the seventies and the early eighties the duo Turk&De Groot soared the Clifton cartoon stories to the top of the lists with nearly twenty stories.
Then at the peak of changes in the mid eighties, Bédu took over, and continued with over ten more Clifton stories well into the nineties. His last Clifton story was published in 1995. Recently after a long and quiet period, Rodrigue with again Bob de Groot have taken over, and two Clifton stories have been published since 2003.
Timeline of major stories
- Op Speurtocht met Kolonel Clifton
- Clifton in New York
- Clifton tegen de spionnen
- De rennende stem
- De lachende dief
- Alias Lord X
- Sir Jason
- Dear Mr Wilkinson
- 7 dagen om te sterven
- Hartkloppingen (assisted by Walli )
- Een panter voor de kolonel (assisted by Walli )
- Weekend om te doden (assisted by Michel Breton
- Kidnapping (assisted by Michel Breton
Find at the Clifton website the details of all Clifton stories, the above major stories, and also minor publications.
Publications in magazines and books
The cartoonists worked with original French stories, whereas all were published simultaneously in French and Dutch, the two main Belgian languages, in the weekly magazines Tintin (French), Junior (French) and Kuifje (Dutch) and Ons Volkske (Dutch), all four by Lombard Editions in Brussels.
Subsequently, the stories were also published in cartoon albums (BD or Bandes Dessinées in French, stripboeken in Dutch) by the same publisher, and in co-operation with several non-Belgian publishers, such as Drukkerij-Uitgeverij Helmond (the Netherlands) and Carlsen Verlag (Germany), and in several other magazines, such as Zack and YPS (both German).
In the mid-eighties even a movie was made by Belvision, the movie department of Lombard.
Beside French and Dutch, translations were made to Finnish, Danish, and also to German where in some publications our hero is named Percy Pickwick.
Over the whole period of more than 45 years, over 30 stories (from one to 42 pages each, totalling over 800 pages) of Clifton have been published sofar, from the hands of 6 cartoonists and scenarists.
References
