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Interesting... I haven't found a single webpage in English, and my Italian is kinda shaky—but a hilariously inept Babelfish translation of this page tells me that the ALAN FORD strip seems to have been a parody of Sean Connery-era Bond films, with the title character a mild-mannered commercial artist who gets recruited for a superspy organization called TNT.
The creative team (at least initially) was writer Luciano Secchi, a.k.a. Max Bunker, and artist Roberto Raviola a.k.a Magnus. began in 1969 and ran 75 volumes, ending sometime in the 80s. However, the consensus seems to be that there was a drastic drop-off in quality after Magnus left the strip in 1973 (volume 48).
Reading between the lines, it seems that ALAN FORD faded for the same reason that the Bond films that inspired it did—the swingin' super-spy genre was too tied to the Sixties, and as the hangover of that decade faded, it became harder and harder to find any life in it.
The art, as you can see, tended towards caricature...
But Alan himself was a handsome devil...
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