as a daily comic 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). Some issues included uncredited short stories; an additional short story, "Danger No. 5", appeared as filler in issue 2 of the 1952 war comic Captain Steve Savage. 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. It was, however, adapted as a comic strip in the British weekly comic TV Tornado (later merging with TV21), where it ran from 1967 to 1970, drawn by Vicente Alcazar. The strip was titled Meet the Saint in later issues. In Sweden, a long-running Saint comic book was 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 in the summer of 2012, but it never went beyond a single promotional issue "zero". In magazines The original Saint novellas first appeared in The Thriller (1929–1940), edited by Monty Hayden, a friend of the author, who was sometimes given a thinly disguised role in the early stories. Charteris also edited or oversaw several magazines that tied in with the Saint. The first of these were anthologies titled The Saint's Choice that ran for seven issues in