Simon Templar - The Saint in The Comics

The Saint in The Comics

The Saint appeared in a long-running comic strip series starting as a daily strip 27 September 1948 with a Sunday added on 20 March the following year. The early strips were written by Leslie Charteris, who had previous experience writing comic strips, having replaced Dashiell Hammett as the writer of the Secret Agent X-9 strip. The original artist was Mike Roy. In 1951, when John Spranger replaced Roy as the artist, he altered The Saint's appearance by depicting him with a beard. Bob Lubbers illustrated The Saint in 1959 and 1960. The final two years of the strip were drawn by Doug Wildey before it came to an end on 16 September 1961.

Concurrent with the comic strip, Avon Comics published 12 issues of a The Saint comic book between 1947 and 1952 (some of these stories were reprinted in the 1980s). The 1960s TV series is unusual in that it is one of the few major programs of its genre that was not adapted as a comic book in the United States.

In Sweden, The Saint had a long-running comic book published from 1966 to 1985 under the title Helgonet. It originally reprinted the newspaper strip, but soon original stories were commissioned for Helgonet. These stories were also later reprinted in other European countries. Two of the main writers were Norman Worker and Donne Avenell; the latter also co-wrote the novels The Saint and the Templar Treasure and the novella collection Count on the Saint, while Worker contributed to the novella collection Catch the Saint.

A new American comic book series was launched by Moonstone Comics in the summer of 2012.