The man behind a football comic strip in The Sun has confirmed he is blowing the final whistle on it after 35 years.

Striker, created by island resident Pete Nash, has featured for The Sun on and off since 1985. Originally it ran up until 2003 and since then it has had a stop start life cycle at the paper.

The final Striker will be published in The Sun on Friday.

But it won’t be the end of Striker. Mr Nash then plans to publish the comic in book form, consisting of former editions, and is looking to take Striker to the small and big screen.

The comic strip focuses on the life and career of Nick Jarvis, who is player manager at Warbury Warriors.

Story lines have included Jarvis being framed for drug possession, a club chairman from America fleeing a guilt-ridden past, helping a Russian player and his wife defect to the west, and getting involved with a juvenile delinquent with promising football skills and an abusive father.

Mr Nash said that after over three decades ’there isn’t a story I haven’t done’.

Speaking to MTTV, Mr Nash said: ’You find yourself racking your brain to come up with a new story and also the money newspapers pay for comic strips now is a lot less, so I have to think about doing something different and reinventing Striker.

’I think the time has come to tell the Striker comic story in a TV series, so I’m going to write a Striker novel in the first instance and a screenplay and hopefully a production company or some of the network, because they’re all looking for new content now.

’So hopefully it will be reinvented for the big or small screen but there is nothing definite on that yet.’

As he embraces the changing nature of the news industry, Striker has appeared on the newspaper’s website and in a series of books which goes back to the start of the series.

Mr Nash said: ’I get fan mail from people who say they’ve never seen Striker and discovered it last year and then there is people who have followed it from day one.’

It hasn’t always been easy along the way as the paper once tried to claim intellectual ownership of Striker to protect Mr Nash from taking his comic to another newspaper.

He said that while he won, it was ’a point of no return and the relationship was never the same after that’.

Mr Nash said some of the work on the book could be done in the island.

He said: ’One of the great things about the Isle of Man is there is a lot of creative people both involved in the film industry and writing.

’So it would be fantastic to collaborate with anyone in the Isle of Man who thinks they may be able to help.’

Mr Nash moved to the island from Kent with his family in 2006 to allow his son to study at King William’s College.

He described the island as ’beautiful with so much space’.