Wednesday, 28 December 2022

Obscure British Super Heroes -Unit 4

 It has been a long time since I did one of these!  About an hour ago (0050 hrs) I picked up an old copy of the (obviously) printed Comic Bits and found tucked inside a copy of Rich Holden's Un-Caged no. 5 from 1987.Rich published from Hawarden, Clwyd (Wales) and produced a large number of small press comics of which I have a few.

It is hard to explain why but, whenever someone heard that a new issue of Un-Caged or any Holden publication had arrived they immediately had to see it. When it was funny you were in hysterics and when it was not so funny...you still laughed. I vaguely recall a strip featuring a young lodger who somehow fell for his aged land lady! I really need to dig out those issues.

Anyway, I was reading through this issue and suddenly saw Unit 4 by Dave Cross who I recall exchanging a couple of letters with. I looked at the strip and realised it had totally slipped my mind.  Again, I need to see if there were strips in previous issues or not.







The style is what you expect from the small press -someone competently drawing something he was having fun with. No major cosmic or pan-dimensional parallel crises just a good old fashion hit-and-run. It still reads as fun over thirty years on.  And I thought to myself "I'll have to do an Obscure British Super Heroes post on this" as I carried on reading and

...another Unit 4 strip!

This one had no text and saw a cowboy on a flying horse capture two of the team. Why? No idea but at the time cowboys on flying robot horses or robot cowboys on flying robot horses were "a thing" -I still have a strip John Royle drew for me that was published in volume 1 of Black Tower Adventure that is still enjoyable to read in 2022 and that involved robot horses and cowboy robot gun-slingers.




So just what is going on?  No idea but if there is another part in issue 6 I hope it explains everything like who are these characters and why Unit 4 and...well enough to satisfy my aging mind!

Where is Dave Cross today?

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