BMX Racing History · BMX Media · Legend Bike Co.

Radical Rick

The BMX Plus! comic strip that became the sport's cartoon mascot

Before you got to the race results in BMX Plus!, you flipped to the back for Rick. A kid on a bike who never lost his nerve, drawn by a guy who was barely out of his teens himself, running month after month for thirteen years. Most magazine mascots don't outlast the issue they're printed in. Radical Rick outlasted the magazine's whole era — and forty-plus years later, he's still getting drawn.

Born in Irvine, November 1979

Damian Fulton drew the first Radical Rick strips at his parents' house in Irvine, California, in November 1979. The strip hit newsstands the next month, in the January 1980 issue of BMX Plus!. Early episodes ran black-and-white, one page at a time. By the time Fulton closed the book on Rick in 1993, the strip had grown into a full-color two-page spread, and the run totaled 154 episodes — the number printed on the spine of the strip's own collected-episodes book decades later.

One title, not the other

Worth being precise about, because the two magazines get mixed up: Radical Rick ran in BMX Plus!, published out of the Hi-Torque stable. It never ran in BMX Action, Bob Osborn's separate, competing Wizard Publications title. The two magazines fought for the same readers through the same years, and Rick belonged to one of them entirely.

The cast

The strip ran a small, consistent cast. Rick was the fearless lead, always game for the next jump. MX Mug played the cowardly but loyal sidekick. Spike Speedwrench kept the bikes running as the resident mechanic. Skuzzer Switchblade was the bad guy every issue needed. Simple roles, drawn sharp, repeated for over a decade — the kind of consistency that turns a strip into a character kids actually remember.

More than ink on a page

Rick's likeness spread past the strip itself and onto race plates, pad sets, t-shirts, stickers, and the side panels of bikes that had nothing to do with BMX Plus!. That mattered at a time when every rider rolled up to the gate on a bike from a different brand, in the colors of a different sanction. Rick didn't belong to any one team or brand. He belonged to the sport, and that gave BMX an inside joke and a visual identity that no single company could claim credit for.

The afterlife

Fulton never really put Rick down. The full run was collected into Radical Rick: The Complete Episodes, a softcover and hardcover book that reprints all 154 episodes on quality stock, adds previously unpublished Fulton artwork, and carries a foreword from Mat Hoffman alongside anecdotes from Bob Haro, Mike "Rooftop" Escamilla, and Eddie Fiola. The hardcover sold out in 48 hours; the softcover followed.

Haro built a Radical Rick cruiser line in 24, 26, and 29-inch sizes carrying Fulton's hand-drawn graphics. Flite makes Radical Rick pad sets in the original screen-printed style. Fulton has taken the character on the road too, with a 45th "Radiversary" tour that put him at old-school races and reunions around the country, and he still posts new Rick art through radicalrickbmx.com and its "Rad News" newsletter.

Why it still matters

A lot of magazines from that era are gone and mostly forgotten outside collector circles. Radical Rick is the exception — a character that outlived the magazine that printed him, outlived the bike brands running ads next to him, and is still selling out print runs in 2026. That kind of staying power belongs to very few things in this sport, and almost none of them are cartoons.

Where the record runs thin

Where Radical Rick fits in the bigger story

People: Damian Fulton. Media: BMX Plus! Magazine, BMX Action Magazine, Club Homeboy — a different magazine's inside joke from the same BMX-media culture. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.