2025 marks 60 years since the newspaper of the future was first published! In celebration of TV Century 21's 60th anniversary, we've been producing a variety of in-depth retrospectives on several of the beloved artists behind many classic Gerry Anderson comic strips (such as Frank Bellamy, Ron Embleton and Mike Noble) and counting down out ten favourite story arcs from the comic.

We're also marking the comic's landmark anniversary with the release of our first two Thunderbirds Comic Anthologies.

Away from the comic's much-loved Supermarionation-based strips, TV Century 21 featured an assortment of comparatively obscure heroes, who also greatly featured within the comic's shared futuristic timeline. From space spies to scientific trouble-shooters and horrendous apocalyptic doomsdays, let's investigate the secret heroes of TV Century 21!

Agent 21

Undoubtedly the best known of TV Century 21's original Anderson adjacent characters is super spy Brent Cleever, aka Agent 21. Designed to latch onto the spy-fi craze of the 1960s, Agent 21 is as purely a distilled take on an Anderson-esque interpretation of James Bond as you can imagine. Operating under the secretive guise of a travelling toy sales man for Century 21 Toys based on Mars, Cleever operates for the Universal Secret Service as one of its top spies, battling against various enemy forces and maintaining peace and security within the Earth Space Empire. 

Cleever's adventures begin, rather brilliantly, in issue #21 of the comic in July 1965 and his tenure would last right until the comic's end in September 1969. Across his 39 adventures told over 200 issues of the comic, Cleever proved impervious to the stylistic overhauls that so many other strips in TV21 endured. Aside from a single storyline in 1967 illustrated by Jon Davies, the remaining 38 storylines were illustrated by Scottish artist Rab Hamilton, who gifted the strip with a stark, monochromatic flavour that enhanced its sternly downbeat attitude. 

Intriguingly, Agent 21 would still undergo a variety of format changes during its lengthily span. Throughout his lengthily career, Cleever held onto numerous codenames. Throughout the strip's first year in the comic, it was simply titled 21, subtitled as 21's Life Story on TV21's covers. Between 1966 and 1967, the strip was retitled 21 Special Agent. For these first two years, the strip set in the shared timeline's formative past of the 2040s. Designed to explain away various defining events that impact the 'modern' timeline of the 2060s (such as the British revolution and its subsequent joining with the World Government), Cleever's formative adventures included appearances from the World Space Patrol and World Aquanaut Security Patrol, then still being constructed. TV Century 21's assistant editor Tod Sullivan has long been associated with scripting the strip, though it's likely that editor-in-chief Alan Fennell also contributed.

Between January and September 1968, this prequel pretence was retired and Cleever found himself thrust into the current timeline of the 2060s. Retired from active service, he unexpectedly acquires the superhuman powers of advanced magnetism and becomes the personal bodyguard of the World President. Mr. Magnet, as the strip was now called, wouldn't last too long before Cleever found himself back in the service of the U.S.S. For the final year of TV Century 21's lifespan, Secret Agent 21 was a move supposedly instigated by the comic's third and final editor-in-chief Howard Elson to ensure the flailing comic returned to a back-to-basics formula.

From battling the villainous ambitions of the Solar Organisation for Revenge and Murder to abandoning his U.S.S. duties to avenge the death of a fellow agent, Agent 21 injected TV21 with a mature, cynical espionage edge.

The Investigator

Hot on the heals of the creative successes enjoyed by Agent 21, TV Century 21 enhanced its futuristic world with further original characters, the next one being The Investigator. This short-lived strip sees Bob Develin - man of power - and head trouble-shooter at Universal Engineering Incorporated called in to resolve a variety of science-driven abnormalities. UE.I. is explained as being the manufacturers of many classic Anderson craft seen on screen and in the pages of the comic, with credits including the Fireflash, the W.S.P.'s XL craft and more.

Illustrated by Don Harley, the strip ran for a shockingly brief span of two storylines between June and September 1966 before the strip was swiftly replaced by a more vibrant adventurer. The character of Bob Develin is portrayed as grouchy and rather aged compared to the younger heroes of the comic, which may have prevented the strip from appealing to young readers. The Investigator is still given a noble if intensely dramatic send-off when Bob commits the ultimate sacrifice to prevent an uprising of violent robots against humanity.

Catch or Kill

Far more successful than The Investigator is Catch or Kill, a wild departure from the usual mecha-heavy sci-fi adventure so typically associated with the worlds of Anderson. By pursuing an altogether different set-up, Catch or Kill achieves its own enjoyably unique and adventurous edge.

Catch or Kill tells the adventures of Crag Gorton, the man who collects - trouble! Gorton is introduced as a lazy, millionaire playboy who finds himself left a vast fortune by his uncle, on the condition that he track down a rare animal. Initially driven by greed, Gorton's mission instils a renewed spirit of adventure to discover more of the wild creatures that roam our worlds. He subsequently offers his services freelance in capturing or killing ferocious or otherwise exotic creatures, whether in dense jungles or on faraway planets. Gorton's adventures crossed paths with the World Space Patrol and Universal Secret Service.

Tod Sullivan is credited with scripting the strip's opening story (did Sullivan therefore pen The Investigator, too?) before the strip was apparently taken over by script editor Angus Allan, and the drastic change is noticeable. We violently swing from wildlife adventure to outlandish cosmic monster fare before the strip settles into a comfortable routine. This self-described space safari was chiefly illustrated in spectacularly riotous style by John Burns and ran for nine storylines between October 1966 and July 1967. 

Front Page

Catch or Kill eventually found itself usurped by a more meta-fictional strip from TV Century 21. The newspaper of the future wasn't just a hugely successful comic - it was also a legitimate newspaper within its own fictional world. Front Page takes this approach to its most logically extreme conclusion by depicting the daring exploits of TV21's reporters and photographers, uncovering the truth of the dangerous world of the 21st century! Were readers meant to believe that Front Page had its fictional equivalent within the fictional newspaper version of TV21 itself? Trippy stuff!

Front Page focuses on reporter Pete Tracker and photographer Lens Cap (geddit?) and enjoyed a brief flurry of four storylines illustrated by Burns between July and December 1967. The strip's rather transparent functionality emerges most fully with the imminent arrival of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, which was subject to a colossal marketing campaign from TV21 and its sister titles. Throughout the months leading up to Spectrum's debut in September 1967, TV21 readers were given first-hand accounts of a mysterious mission to Mars led by an agent codenamed Captain Black, contact with which becomes lost, and the curious sightings of a gargantuan aircraft carrier. 

Front Page gains its most direct dramatic momentum when Pete and Lens seek to uncover the mystery surrounding the lost Zero X's sudden return to Earth and the reveal of a new security organisation consisting of colour-coded operatives. 

Project S.W.O.R.D.

After this string of ever-changing heroes running in parallel to Brent Cleever's own dangerous missions, original characters in TV21 took a breather during the first few months of 1968. From March 1968 however, an darkly apocalyptic vision of the futuristic world envisioned by TV21 grasped readers with the relaunch of Project S.W.O.R.D. 

Project S.W.O.R.D. had begun as Century 21 Toys' acquisition of pre-existing science fiction toys that demanded accompanying media produced to successfully sell them. Project S.W.O.R.D. began as an underwhelming comic strip in the pages of the short-lived SOLO. This embryonic take on the concept detailed the Space World Organisation for Research and Development's efforts to colonise nearby planets following the drying up of Earth's own resources. Running for only a pair of storylines by a unknown writer/artist duo between June and September 1967, SOLO's merger with TV Tornado resulted in the Project S.W.O.R.D. comic strip being swiftly abandoned.

SOLO's merger still left Century 21 Toys with merchandise that needed publicising. Rather than continue where the poorly executed SOLO strip left off, Project S.W.O.R.D. was transformed into an ongoing series of text stories in TV Century 21. Project S.W.O.R.D. becomes a maelstrom of jarring cynicism. In the far-flung future of 3031, a colossal meteorite collides with the Earth. Entire continents are wiped from existence in an instant. What's left of the ruptured Earth becomes a ticking timebomb of pent-up pressure, threatening to detonate at any given moment.

Having already successfully colonised neighbouring planetary bodies, S.W.O.R.D. is recalled with a new three-pronged mission: the evacuation of the most valued members of what's left of humanity in the efforts to rebuild the Earth; the rehabilitation of those left behind, i.e. the Rejects, which includes extinguishing the ongoing anarchistic malevolence of the Casuals; and finally, the investigation and possible resolving of the Earth's ruptured state.

TV21's Project S.W.O.R.D. sees the comic operating at a darkly depressing peak. 40 standalone stories paint a gruesomely vivid picture of humanity entrapped within a seemingly inescapable doom. The stories are illustrated by the likes of Ron Embleton, Don Lawrence, Jon Davies, and Malcolm Stokes, who also illustrated much of the accompanying Project S.W.O.R.D. annual. While the TV21 text stories are bleakly compelling, the annual remains the apex of the S.W.O.R.D. experience. Much of this reinvented S.W.O.R.D. was the creation of Angus Allan, who almost single-handedly wrote the annual, and most likely wrote the text stories in the comic, too.

Lost Futures

TV21's evolving line-up of original heroes capture thrillingly unpredictable storytelling avenues across the comic's shared Gerry Anderson timeline. They purposefully feel distinct in concept and execution from the likes of the comic's Thunderbirds, Stingray and Captain Scarlet strips. If those more well-known strips showcased what the comic's shared universe could do, then Agent 21, The Investigator, Catch or Kill, Front Page and Project S.W.O.R.D. display what else this universe could achieve. 

Despite their vitality to TV Century 21's creative identity and the ongoing popularity of the comic with fans, these characters have found themselves increasingly lost to time as the decades have worn on since the comic's end in 1969. 

While reprint collections of classic Gerry Anderson comics have been commonplace for several decades, these obscure comic-only heroes have been consistently shunted aside. Agent 21 made a brief return to active service when the TV21 strip was used to bulk out Fleetway's short-lived Joe 90 comic, but none of these characters have ever reappeared in anthology collections. 

Agent 21, Project S.W.O.R.D. and Front Page were featured in Network Distributing's commemorative issue #243 of TV Century 21, produced as part of their Filmed in Supermarionation deluxe boxset. As satisfying as that one-off novelty issue was in acknowledging these characters' legitimacy, complete anthology collections of Agent 21, The Investigator, Catch or Kill, Front Page and Project S.W.O.R.D. remain annoyingly elusive. Perhaps at some point in the near future, these characters will have their thrilling adventures preserved for prosperity!

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