The Tower King
British comic book story
"The Tower King" is a British comic science fiction strip, appearing in titles published by IPC Magazines. The story was published in the weekly comic, Eagle, from 27 March to 4 September 1982, written by Alan Hebden, with art by José Ortiz. The story was set in a dystopian London, where society has broken down.
Creation
While the relaunched Eagle included a mix of photo and conventional picture strips. "The Tower King" was one of the latter. It was written by IPC stalwart Alan Hebden, who had experience writing for Battle Picture Weekly (including creating Major Eazy) and 2000 AD. José Ortiz provided the art; while the strip was in black-and-white, the web offset printing method used for Eagle meant he was able to give the art a grey wash, enhancing the atmosphere and detail. The strip's creators made use of the opportunity by juxtapositioning jarring visual elements, such as historic London landmarks strewn with the rubble of modern buildings, or soldiers in patchwork armour complete with pocket watches and police helmets, armed with both halberds and grenades.
Publication history
The story debuted in the launch issue of the new Eagle, dated 27 March 1982 and continued until the 4 September 1982 edition - when it was effectively replaced by another Ortiz-drawn strip, "The House of Daemon".
In 1998, the rights to the strips created for Eagle – including "House of Daemon" – were purchased from Egmont Publishing by the Dan Dare Corporation. In 2014, Hibernia Books licensed "The Tower King" and produced a collected edition with a foreword by 2000 AD artist Leigh Gallagher, initially in a print run of 200 copies.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Tower King” is british comic book story. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Tower, King and British, not as a finished interpretation.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7769736. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1982, 2000, 1998 and 2014.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Tower King” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.