...Andrew and I were approached by The Daily Mirror and asked if we would be interested in doing a strip for them. This approach had been based on research they had done about the percentage of readers who followed a comic strip in their chosen newspaper. Apparently, Beau Peep in "The Star" had come out top. We were hugely flattered and, in this business, opportunities like this seldom come along so we put our heads together. I really liked the idea of a Western strip. We had already done a series of one-off cartoons for men's magazines which spoofed the Lone Ranger and I suggested to Andrew that we expand on that. And so it began. Having decided that we were going in that direction, we then had to come up with a title. In my mind, I started trawling through the titles of famous Western films and the obvious one was "High Noon". My first suggestion was "Five Past Twelve" which Andrew, rightly, discarded as too obscure. Then I remembered one of my favourite Westerns of all time---A Man Called Horse. Not a huge step to A Man Called Horace.
From the beginning, I always thought that Horace was going to be a kind of brief spin-off from the (at that time) reasonably successful Beau Peep.
It's now been going 20 years and---well, I can't believe it.
