Battle Picture Weekly #10 January 1976 [45]
Battle Picture Weekly #45 (10 January 1976) marks the debut of Major Eazy, one of the most enduring characters produced by the British weekly anthology format. Written by Alan Hebden and drawn by Carlos Ezquerra, Eazy brought a cool, anti-authoritarian archetype to British war comics that stood apart from the stiff-upper-lip tradition — a deliberate creative counterpoint to the genre's conventions. Scholar Jochen Ecke later analysed the strip as an early example of the British Invasion aesthetic, noting how its structure challenged readers to anticipate an unconventional protagonist's actions rather than simply accept his inevitable triumph. The issue also marks the moment Ezquerra committed full-time to Battle Picture Weekly, a creative decision that would directly feed into his development as the artist who went on to design Judge Dredd.
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After the successful launch of Battle Picture Weekly in March 1975 under Pat Mills and John Wagner, editor Dave Hunt was left managing the anthology's ongoing churn of strips, with reader correspondence used to rank and rotate stories. Alan Hebden — whose father Eric was the title's technical advisor — had already been writing for 'Rat Pack' when he conceived Major Eazy; Hunt and assistant editor Steve MacManus used the new strip as the vehicle to persuade Carlos Ezquerra, who had been splitting his time between Battle and DC Thomson, to commit to IPC full-time. Ezquerra designed the character himself, and later credited the strip with being the work through which his visual style truly crystallised.
Trivia · 9 facts
- First appearance of Major Eazy: issue dated 10 January 1976, Battle Picture Weekly #45 (IPC Magazines), written by Alan Hebden and drawn by Carlos Ezquerra.
- The character is an unconventional, cheroot-smoking British Army officer set during World War II, operating first in Sicily and Italy and later in a retroactive North Africa storyline.
- The strip's debut issue cover carried the promotional slogan 'Like him - hate him! You can't ignore... Major Eazy!'
- Ezquerra designed the character visually; the dominant attribution across sources credits the look to James Coburn — particularly his role as Britt in The Magnificent Seven (1960) — though writer Alan Hebden denied Coburn was his own inspiration, citing Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name instead.
- The strip used a largely self-contained three-page episode format, a structure Hebden later described as ideal for batch-writing during long journeys.
- From 29 January 1977 (Battle Picture Weekly #100), the strip crossed over with 'Rat Pack' — renamed 'Major Eazy versus Rat Pack' — marking the first inter-strip crossover in Battle Picture Weekly's history, a rarity in British anthology comics of the era.
- When Major Eazy was reprinted in Battle in 1983, an IPC-wide no-smoking policy required Eazy's signature cheroot to be painted out of every panel, sometimes leaving the character's hand in an inadvertently rude gesture.
- The strip has been collected multiple times: as Major Eazy: Heart of Iron by Titan Comics (2010), Major Eazy vs. Rat Pack by Rebellion Developments (2020), and Major Eazy: The Italian Campaign by Rebellion under their Treasury of British Comics imprint (2021), with the 2021 collection restoring colour pages never previously reprinted.
- Major Eazy directly inspired the Judge Dredd Megazine character 'Cursed Earth Koburn', created by writer Gordon Rennie and drawn by Ezquerra himself — the name 'Koburn' being a deliberate reference to James Coburn.