Action was a British weekly boys' comic published by IPC Magazines from 14 February 1976 to 5 November 1977, when it merged with war comic Battle after 86 issues. The comic was created by Pat Mills and Geoff Kemp.
While initially a sales success, the comic quickly received media criticism for its violent content, causing a moral panic that ultimately saw it withdrawn from sale by IPC in October 1976, amid rumours it was to be banned. Action returned two months later in a much-sanitised form, quickly losing readers and being cancelled the following year. Despite its short lifespan, Action was highly influential on the British comics scene, and was a direct forerunner of the long-running 2000 AD.
Creation
After a successful stint working on various IPC girls' comics, Pat Mills had interviewed for the vacant position of managing editor at the company. Mills felt the company's output had grown stale and outdated and told the board so, and wasn't offered the job due to his forthright criticism. However, his fresh ideas had been noted by editorial director John Sanders, who likewise felt the company's comics needed an overhaul but found it politically difficult to do so due to the long-serving, well-connected nature of much of the company's staff. He was impressed enough to remember Mills when charged with creating an answer to DC Thomson's Warlord comic, assigning Mills and his fellow freelancer John Wagner to create Battle Picture Weekly in 1974. Despite internal friction from the bypassed staff the comic was a major triumph, and Sanders quickly moved to use them elsewhere in IPC's boys adventure division.
Wagner was given editorship of Valiant, which had been the company's leading title of the sixties but was now increasingly outdated, while Mills was tasked with creating a new weekly. Having learnt about Mills' perfectionism in the launch of Battle – which required the guidance of veteran Dave Hunt to make its launch date – Mills was given a choice of staff editors to work with, picking the experienced Geoff Kemp. Kemp had a long history with the company, including a sizeable stint as assistant editor of Lion (which he had helped update in the mid-1960s, being the driving force behind the introduction of the likes of anti-hero The Spider) but was identified by Sanders and Mills as one of the staff most open to new ideas. The pair were given three months to put the comic together from scratch; while Mills felt this was a "ridiculously short time", the more seasoned Kemp would later note it was the longest run-in he had ever known. The pair quickly settled on a formula of taking extant story ideas, approaching them from a different angle and injecting a large amount of contemporary realism. Mills envisioned making a title that appealed to children that didn't read comics rather than simply trying to draw an audience from other titles, and as such aimed to make the title streetwise and more in touch.
Following this template, the pair looked at the blockbuster film Jaws and switched the perspective by following the shark, while making many of the human characters unsympathetic, to create "Hook Jaw". "Hellman of Hammer Force" took the old staple of World War II but followed an Axis protagonist in the form of fiercely principled tank commander Major Kurt Hellman. According to Mills, Sanders was initially reluctant about running the story, but was worn down by repeated requests. "Dredger" applied the hard-edged ethos of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry to the spy genre. "Blackjack" was a boxing story, but unlike those featured previously in the likes of Tiger and Valiant not only took a closer look at corruption in the sport but also featured a black protagonist, infused with the brashness of Muhammad Ali; Mills would later recall some of IPC's staff felt Barron being black would make the strip unpopular, and urging him to change the character to a white man with a black sidekick. A similarly unsentimental view of athletics and youth was evident in "Sport's Not For Losers!", about a working class lout who smoked but had an unexpected talent for long-distance running. For "The Running Man", Mafiosi and a face-swap were added to the format of The Fugitive. The obligatory football strip, "Play Till You Drop!", featured a player controlled by a blackmailing journalist, while "The Coffin Sub" featured a captain wracked with survivor's guilt wondering if he was leading his new crew to their deaths. Rejected were an ecologically tinged fishing story (dropped when a dummy episode proved too bleak) and a story about a photographer with a knack of getting in the thick of unpleasant situations, as well as World War I aviation strip "The Suicide Club" by Kelvin Gosnell (which was eventually used as a one-off in the 1976 Action Special).
They also looked at the editorial content, feeling that this also dated their competitors by generally being too paternal and condescending. Steve MacManus, who was writing "The Running Man" and "Sport's Not For Losers!", found himself corralled into the role of 'ActionMan', whereby readers would set the unfortunate writer bizarre stunts; MacManus would be photographed doing the winning entry and the reader who submitted it would be awarded with £10. MacManus also handled running the letters column, taking on the persona of a put-upon dogsbody forever trying to avoid tyrannical editor Peg-Leg and have a cup of tea in peace. Readers were encouraged to submit bizarre and stupid questions to resident 'Knowall' Milton Finesilver and, most anarchically, to nominate a public figure as 'Twit of the Week'. Each 'Twit' would have their portrait printed together with a pithy dismissal of whatever they had done to invoke the readership's ire. Bamber Gascoigne, Nicholas Parsons, Russell Harty, The Bay City Rollers, Malcolm Allison and Tony Blackburn were among those honoured. The idea was to let the readers know they considered them as equals – in the words of MacManus, to let readers know "We know what you're thinking". As with Battle, the plan was for Mills and Kemp to bed in the new title and then hand it over to an experienced editor for week-to-week running.
Mills purposefully modelled the page layouts on infamous British tabloid newspaper The Sun, later explaining: -
Doug Church worked as art director on the comic, as he had done on Battle. The plan was originally to name the new comic 'Boots' or 'Dr. Martens' (in honour of the tough kid's footwear of choice) but instead Mills chose 'Action'. He initially wanted to call it Action 76 and change the number incrementally to emphasise the comic's up to date nature, but this went down poorly with newsagents and the idea was dropped.
Publishing history
Backed by a television advertising campaign the first issue sold 250,000 copies – a sizeable figure at the time. As was standard for the industry figures soon dropped to a respectable range of 160,000 to 170,000. However, instead of dropping further they stabilised and then actually started to increase as word-of-mouth spread, and IPC's post room was swamped by reader's letters. Having learnt of Action, IPC's rival DC Thomson brought out Bullet in response; however, produced by the same hands as Victor, Hornet and Hotspur it failed to make much of an impression. In the early days of the comic, Mills was very hands-on, rewriting many of the scripts himself.
Controversy Almost immediately Action's violence began to attract attention from the press. On 23 February 1976, The London Evening Standard ran an article on the comic, criticising its bloodletting. More sustained criticism came from The Sun, which dissected Action on 30 April 1976. As author Martin Baker has noted, the article itself was relatively balanced but the headline – "The Sevenpenny Nightmare", in reference to the notorious Victorian penny dreadfuls – set the tone for a campaign against the title's immorality. However, the excellent sales led to the creative staff being egged on in some cases.
Meanwhile, the comic continued, and the first round of changes to the contents were instigated. "The Coffin Sub" and "Play Till You Drop" proved unpopular with readers and were ejected in favour of World War II commando story "Green's Grudge War" and a new football strip, "Look Out for Lefty!". The latter revolved around the supremely gifted but short-tempered Kenny 'Lefty' Lampton, a borderline thug whose off-the-pitch life rang more true than the kidnappings and assassination plots faced by Roy of the Rovers. May saw the Northern poverty of "Sport's Not For Losers!" swapped out for "Death Game 1999", a highly violent lift of successful sci-fi film Rollerball, and in June trucking drama "Hell's Highway" replaced "The Running Man". John Smith meanwhile took over the editorship from Kemp; his previous experience had largely been with nursery titles. The creative teams on the various strips meanwhile revelled in treading new ground and pushing boundaries.
Meanwhile, the press attention on the title refused to go away. Self-appointed public guardian Mary Whitehouse and her NVLA – influential with the powerful tabloid press and Parliament – took a sojourn from trying to remove violence from television to begin campaigning against Action. Another moralistic pressure group, Delegates Opposing Violent Education, threatened to have its members deface Action in newsagents by adding stickers denouncing the publication as being in violation of the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955. Denis Gifford, a former cartoonist turned comics historian whose books had made him the doyen of British comics, gave colour quotes negatively comparing Action to his beloved nonviolent pre-war comics such as Happy Days. Much of the reportage drew comparisons between Action and the lurid pre-code American horror titles of the 1950s, which had been banned in Britain by the act of Parliament.
Sanders became the public face of Action's defence, stoutly maintaining it was still less violent than numerous popular films and television shows. However, behind the scenes he attempted to moderate the comic. Despite his efforts, in September 1976 criticism reached a new level. Two strips brought particular attention. New addition "Kids Rule O.K." featured a version of present-day Britain where a disease suddenly killed off the world's adult population, leaving the country filled with tough gangs of teenagers fighting to survive, while "Look Out for Lefty!" covered the player's breakthrough into the first team. In the latter, Lefty's iconoclasm had created an enemy among his team-mates who went out of their way to disrupt the title character's game. Seeing this from the terraces, Lefty's spiky girlfriend Angie threw a bottle at the attacker, knocking him out and allowing Lefty's talent to shine through. At the time football hooliganism was on a sharp rise and the press accused the comic of endorsing such behaviour, with noted referee Jack Taylor among those to supply condemnatory statements to the tabloids. The same 18 September edition had also launched "Kids Rule O.K." with a front cover – rendered by Carlos Ezquerra – featuring a bike chain wielding youth against a background of urban devastation, standing over what appeared to be the body of a policeman. While in typical comic style the cover image was only tangentially related to the strip itself, the image was seized on by the press as an example of the comic's attempts to corrupt the nation's youth. The artist would later claim this was caused by the colourist, and the helmet and the prone figure were not meant to be related. The controversy was such that a bemused Stan Lee, visiting to do the promotional rounds for Marvel UK's launch of Captain Britain, found himself being questioned about it.
Withdrawal