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The main character was a moustached, multi-talented, highly trained secret agent, aptly named Fireball. When his parents had died in a mysterious car crash when he was a young child, he became the ward of his father's friend Lord Peter Flint, a wartime hero (a.k.a. Warlord). Fireball had been trained by "Uncle Pete" (since childhood) in the arts of shooting, martial arts, sports and survival - this was as well as the usual reading and writing skills. The full Fireball story was secret but could be acquired by joining the "Fireball club" which gave you the story enclosed in a red, plastic wallet. This story was used as the key for a substitution cipher for encrypting/decrypting secret messages which often appeared in Bullet's central pages as a sequence of seemingly random numbers. You also received a Fireball pendant for joining. Fireball's original pendant (which he always wore) saved his life on one occasion - it shielded him from a long range sniper's bullet. Fireball's archenemy was Catriona Klansberg (a.k.a. "The Cat"). Fireball had a soft spot for her - he had a habit of letting her slip away after he had just thwarted her evil plan. She always appeared in the final panel of every strip to give a taster of the following week's adventure.
In December 1978 the comic merged into the longer running Warlord comic.
WARLORD 1-627
WARLORD BOOK FOR BOYS 81, 83, 84, 86
WARLORD SUMMER SPECIALS, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82
It was first published in 1974 by D.C. Thomson. The comic was dedicated to wartime adventures and was a popular success, leading IPC Magazines to create a competitor, Battle Picture Weekly, in 1975. Warlord included several stories per issue, initially centred on a character called Lord Peter Flint (Codename: Warlord), a World War II version of the popular spy James Bond.
At the end of 1978 Warlord absorbed D. C. Thomson's action comic Bullet. In total, Warlord ran for twelve years (627 issues), from 1974 until 1986, at which point it was incorporated into the long-running Victor. For the next four years after the comic's demise the publishers produced summer specials, ending in 1991.
Characters and stories included the popular Union Jack Jackson, Spider Wells, Bomber Braddock and Wingless Wonder. Features included True Life War Story and articles on weaponry called Weapons In Action. After Bullet was added to the comic, it featured that publication's main story Fireball — a secret agent who was Lord Peter Flint's nephew. The comic would often include free gifts such as replica military badges and plastic model warplanes. By solving a cryptographic puzzle and paying a small fee, a reader could become a "Warlord Secret Agent" with an identity card and code book, allowing him to decipher secret messages printed in the comic each week (a gimmick originally employed in the 1950s radio series Captain Midnight).
Before the addition of the more generally action-orientated Bullet, Warlord had been specifically geared towards stories and articles about World War II. Much of the language used in the stories was modern, and terms given used to describe the enemy reflected commonly used descriptions. The Allied forces always won in the end, and both Germans and Japanese were frequently negatively stereotyped.
Sometimes the Germans were shown in a heroic light, usually with honourable Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe officers as the heroes, and committed Nazis or SS officers as the bad guys. These tales were usually set on the Eastern Front to ensure the Germans were not shown killing their British or US enemies, the Russians being useful bogeymen. Comic Strips that followed this model included Iron Annie, about a heroic Junkers Ju 52 'Iron Annie' crew, and Kampfgruppe Falken which followed the exploits of a German penal battalion on the Eastern Front.
Lord Peter Flint was a minor aristocrat and sporting daredevil who became caught up in international espionage when he stumbled upon an assassination by Nazi agents while participating in a 1000 mile race in Austria shortly before the Second World War. He was persuaded by the mysterious Kingpin, a high ranking British intelligence officer, to pose as a Conscientious Objector (thereby ruining his own reputation) in order to build a cover for himself while serving his country as a secret agent, codenamed Warlord. Flint agreed and spent the rest of the war risking his life to thwart the Nazis while scorned and reviled by his friends and family. He frequently crossed swords with the German Abwehr agent Karl Schafft (the two men had a grudging mutual respect and would occasionally find reasons to cooperate with each other) and with the sadistic Gestapo agent Adolf Gruber.
Later in life, Flint became the legal guardian of the son of an old friend, who eventually grew up to become the secret agent codenamed Fireball. Flint himself maintained links with the intelligence community well into the 1970s and occasionally assisted Fireball in an advisory capacity.
By 2012, he was the commanding officer of the superhero team from The Dandy’s Retro Active.
An older Flint would occasionally turn up in the Fireball strip in the pages of Bullet . An even older version is one of the main characters in Retro Active in the online version of The Dandy.