❉ Was legendarily brutal and gruesome comic ‘Action’ just a victim of a moral panic? And what was its legacy?
The first attack on Action came a scant two weeks into publication with The London Evening Standard highlighting the violence and gore in an article published on 23rd February 1976. It took the tabloids a while longer to get in on the act, but when they did so they did with a vengeance. In a two-page splash on April 30th The Sun dubbed the comic ‘The Seven Penny Nightmare’.
1976. A year recalled for its blistering hot summer, but as the pavements cracked and tarmac melted, culturally Britain had become a desert. The year saw Hammer films belch their final horror opus into the cinema circuit in the shape of the fumbled adaptation of To the Devil a Daughter (Peter Sykes, 1976). The Carry On film series was dying an undignified death with the addition of Carry on England (Gerald Thomas, 1976) and stiff competition in the form of Robin Askwith and his The Confessions of a Driving Instructor (Norman Cohen, 1976) film. Cinematically things reached an all-time low with another Askwith vehicle, Queen Kong (Frank Agrama, 1976), a truly diabolical waste of ninety minutes of celluloid. Musically it was even worse – Brotherhood of Man became number one after winning Eurovision and the industry was even deeper in the doldrums.
The UK comic scene was also under threat – sales had fallen on all fronts, with the boy’s adventure comic being particularly hard hit, and many titles struggling to break even. The creative forces behind such titles as Valiant, Victor and Lion had become out of touch with a changing society, trotting out the same mixture of square jawed sporting heroes and stiff upper lip adventurers they had since the heydays of The Eagle in the 1950s. What was needed was fresh blood and a new approach. Something had to change…
The first glimmer of change was the launch of D C Thomson’s Warlord in 1974, the very first British comic devoted purely to tales of men killing men in armed conflict. It was a huge hit and rival comic producers IPC soon launched their response in the form of Battle, an even grimmer and grittier take on all things war. Sales figures were extremely healthy and IPC management were particularly pleased with their gamble to employ freelancers Pat Mills and John Wagner to create Battle. Whilst Wagner was given the task of revitalising the ailing flagship title Valiant Mills was given another new title to oversee and bring to publication. This would be a comic that appealed to the street wise kids who had stopped buying comics. It would be modern, edgy and tough and went under the working title of Doc Martens. This was quite apt as it really would put the boot in, even more than IPC ever dreamed…
Mills needed an angle for the new title. He also needed to change the name, which he did to the succinct and snappy Action. The angle came in the form of pilfering from the best of American cinema and television, taking recent hits or familiar tropes, and adding a new slant. The first issue of Action hit the unsuspecting newsagents on 7th February 1976 (boasting a 14th February cover date) with a strong line-up of eight strips for the measly sum of seven pence. On the inside of the rather tame-looking cover the paper proclaimed “You are about to experience the toughest stories ever – Fast! Fierce! Fantastic! Action is an explosive of the 70s – read it and get caught in the blast!”
Action’s poster boy was, and still is, Hookjaw – the most enduring strip to emerge from the comic’s pages, having been reprinted in several formats and relaunched as mini-series since first publication. Essentially a rip-off of the hit film Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), served up with lashings of gore and graphic images realised by artist Ramon Sola, Hookjaw took his name from a large fishing hook stuck under his ever-hungry mouth. Ken Armstrong scripted the strip though Pat Mills beefed up the stories to become more savage and insisted that at least one person was devoured in each issue in a new and graphic way.
Our Chondrichthye hero saw out three adventures before the eventual banning of Action, chewing his way through the crew of an oil rig, chomping on holiday makers on a Caribbean island resort and devouring unfortunates off the south coast of England. Hookjaw would return after the ban, but in an emasculated form which saw much of the violence take place just outside of the comic panels.
Clint Eastwood and his iconic role Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) would provide the inspiration for Dredger, a no-nonsense tough guy secret agent. The strip was packed with violent deaths and tense situations, and like Hookjaw the story survived the ban, but became a bland espionage adventure series. Dredger’s first adventure saw him tackle another common theme of the 1970s by violently foiling an aircraft hijacking.
The Running Man was inspired by the TV series The Fugitive (1963-1967), with a dash of the Dustin Hoffman movie Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976) in the mix. The story saw athlete Mike Carter the victim of a face change operation so he can take the rap for a Mafia boss. Not only does Carter have to go on the run from both the police and the Mafia, but he also has to hunt down those responsible to clear his name.
Boxing strip Blackjack, created by John Wagner with art by Trigo, told the story of a boxer determined to become world champion and was possibly inspired by the forthcoming blockbuster Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976) combined with elements of Mohammed Ali’s real life story. In his struggle Blackjack came across fight fixers and other miscreants before winning the title and becoming blind. Then the story took a truly bizarre turn with Blackjack becoming a Kung Fu fighting pop star! The strip broke new ground by being the first to feature a black protagonist in a British comic strip.
Hellman of Hammer Force was scripted by Gerry Finley-Day and was the very first British comic strip to examine the Second World War from the perspective of German soldier. Hellman was a tank commander who believed in a clean fight, bringing him into conflict with his superiors. The strip was another post-ban survivor but was stripped of the politics and became an ordinary war strip. Sports Not for Losers had the most direct elements of social commentary with a pushy father who wants his son to become a top athlete. When the boy breaks his leg the father forces his other son, a chain smoking dosser, to take his place. Despite getting into all kinds of trouble the boy starts winning…
The Coffin Sub was one of the weaker links being a standard war story that wouldn’t have been out of place in the pages of Battle or Valiant. This was the least popular of the featured strips and would soon be phased out, coming to an abrupt end issue 8 and replaced by Green’s Grudge War, a story of two soldiers, itself another strip that could easily have appeared in any of IPC’s other boy’s titles.
Death Game 1999 took inspiration from the violent future sports move Rollerball (Norman Jewison, 1975). Inmates in a future Death Row are forced to play a bloody, brutal and deadly sport. If they survive they become heroes to the admiring TV viewers, but secretly the prison governor plans to have them executed.
Look out for Lefty, created and written by Tom Tully, replaced Play Till You Drop as the football strip (an obligatory genre in any UK boy’s adventure comic) and took a different angle to the traditional form of this type of strip, as Mills and Wagner refined the Action formula. The central character was Kenny ‘Lefty’ Lampton, a top-class player whose career is marred by his terrible temper. Despite his skill, and because of his anger management problems, Kenny is resigned to play for third division clubs. With the characters working class background, and a grandfather who surely was modelled on Albert Steptoe, the strip embraced social commentary themes as well as offering the traditional sporting adventures. Little did Action realise that this strip would provide a fatal body blow for the publication…
Kids Rule OK, possibly the second most well remembered strip, was set in a dystopian near-future (1986) London where a plague has killed the adult population, leaving only tribes of juveniles to fight it out on the lawless streets of Britain. Elements of the then still recent film A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) can be seen as an influence on the strip and Mills has indicated that the 1964 novel Only Lovers Left Alive by Dave Wallis was also a direct influence on the storyline. Jack Adrian wrote the story, with Mike White illustrating.
It was soon clear that IPC had a hit on their hands. From initial sales of a quarter of million they soon settled down to a comfortable 170,000 copies. IPC also experienced overwhelmingly feedback from their readership via the veritable landslide of letters they were sent. There are legendary tales of mailbags cluttering up the office corridors at IPC HQ. A UK comic had never connected so well with their audience. However, dark forces were gathering, and national sporting events, the tabloid press and Frank Bough would all contribute to the downfall of Action…
The first attack on Action came a scant two weeks into publication with The London Evening Standard highlighting the violence and gore in an article published on 23rd February 1976. It took the tabloids a while longer to get in on the act, but when they did so they did with a vengeance. In a two-page splash on April 30th The Sun dubbed the comic ‘The Seven Penny Nightmare’. Signs of worry set in at IPC because under an Act of Parliament explicit horror comics were banned in the UK. If enough pressure was brought to bear then IPC could find itself in the courts. Despite these concerns no one at IPC was prepared for the storm of controversy that would erupt in September 1976. Surprisingly it wouldn’t be the ever-hungry Hookjaw that would land the publication in trouble, but the two new strips that had recently made their appearances – The Kids Rule OK and Look out for Lefty.
The fateful issue, dated 18th September, was Action’s thirty second. The comic had matured and found its market niche. Perhaps it had grown too confident, but it was also the victim of circumstances. Early in the month football violence had once more hit the headlines when Millwall fan Ian Pratt died at New Cross station following a scuffle with West Ham supporters that led to him falling under a train pulling into the station. That week’s Action cover sported an illustration by Carlos Ezquerra, later a stalwart of Judge Dredd in 2000AD, and featured an angry mob in the foreground, flames behind them engulfing tower blocks. In the foreground a punky looking youth swirls a metal chain, bearing down on a middle aged man, prone on the floor. Nearby a policeman’s helmet lies on the floor. The implication that the fallen figure is a bobby is obvious. “Aggro is a way of life in Kids Rule OK!” screamed the strapline on the cover.
Inside the comic strip Look out for Lefty would only fan the flames, bearing in mind the real-life headlines of football violence. Lefty was playing his first outing in his team and one his own players was determined to get Lefty dropped from the squad by any means necessary. In the crowds Lefty’s girlfriend witnesses a deliberate kick against his ankle by his team mate and promptly picks up a glass bottle. She hurls it on to the pitch and smacks the offending player on the head, knocking him out. It was all the ammo the comic’s critics needed, and sensing blood much like Hookjaw, they went in for the kill.
Self-appointed guardian of Britain’s moral standards, the Daily Mail, was the first off the blocks with an attacking headline in their September 17th edition bellowed ‘Comic Strip Hooligans’ and then went into a detailed attack of the latest edition. The article quoted comics historian Denis Gifford who added fuel to fire with his comments. “The whole comic is a deliberate attempt to pander to violence. American horror comics were banned in the Fifties. Perhaps it’s time we had another outcry against products like Action,” he frothed. “Action is a new kind of comic geared to the lowest form of behaviour in children. Just as pornography caters for a mass market for adults, stuff like this provides violence for a mass market of children. As far as the people who produce it are concerned, the children are simply a market, and moral considerations do not apply.”
The then Football League secretary Alan Hardaker was even more extreme in his quoted reaction, declaring “The man responsible ought to be hit over the head with a bottle himself. Really, it’s difficult to find words to express the stupidity of action like this – at least words that are printable.” Perhaps Mr Hardaker, who had just suggested someone be bottled for creating the comic strip, also had problems defining words. Such as irony… Another bafflingly aspect of the controversy was that Action had already previously depicted incidents of bottling in its comic strips. Boxing story Black Jack’s eponymous hero had received a bottle to the bonce just three months beforehand amongst several examples.
A torrent of parental complaints by letter or phone followed, flooding the IPC offices. Mary Whitehouse and her National Viewers and Listeners Association was next to climb on the moral bandwagon alongside other moral pressure groups such as DOVE (Delegates Opposing Violent Education). DOVE wrote to distributors and newsagents demanding the withdrawal of Action. In their letters they threatened to ‘black’ the publication by adding their own stickers to the front of displayed editions. The stickers read:
“CAUTION. This is a BLACKED publication. Certain things in this work are not cleared by DOVE as being pro-child, in that they are either by direct meaning, context or implication, an incitement for adults to breach the primary fundamental written principles of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933. Section 1 which clearly prohibits: ‘Assault, ill-treatment, abandonment, neglect and/or mental derangement’ of the child to age 16. In the interests of free speech this publication remains undamaged. DIRECT ACTION by DOVE, Totnes Devon. On the side of the child only – Britain’s Future”.
By late September the TV news media had also got wind of things and nightly news magazine programme Nationwide invited John Sanders (IPC’s editorial director) to be interviewed on air. Sanders tried bravely to defend the comic during the grilling given by Frank Bough, but his appearance was not enough to convince many of the employers at IPC itself. There was rank resentment and bitterness in the air already – staff felt they had been side-lined during the creation of Battle and Action by the creative and editorial powers granted Mills and Wagner. Pressure was building not just externally, but also internally. The IPC parent company Reed International’s board of governors had several members with strong religious and moral beliefs and they felt that Action was bringing the company into ill repute and was propagating an unsuitable image for IPC.
The final blow was the stance taken by the two biggest distributors and stockists of IPC comics, John Menzies and W H Smith. Both companies wrote to IPC threatening not to stock Action, with W H Smith taking an even stronger line and threatening to not stock other IPC comic titles or publications as well. John Sanders issued an edict to try and put the brakes on Action. He demanded the publication be toned down with all examples of excessive violence removed. All pages of artwork were to be seen and cleared by Sanders personally before they went to press. It wasn’t enough however. Action was a profitable publication, but the threat to blacklist all other IPC publications would have been too heavy a price to pay for the company. Under attack by the media, moral pressure groups and from within by IPC employees and Reed board members the comic was withdrawn.
Comics were produced many weeks in advance with several dummy copies printed for final checks before the presses roll and the issue dated 23rd October had reached this point by the time the decision was taken to halt publication. Some of these dummy issues survived and there are scans in circulation on the internet. After many changes the 23rd October issue would be the basis for the relaunch issue of Action, dated 4th December. The comic did not acknowledge the reasons for the hiatus with readers, but it was very evident that there was a distinct change in approach.
Kids Rule OK never reappeared, just seemingly vanishing into the ether from my ten-year-old point of view. Death Game 1999 and Hookjaw were markedly less gruesome and brutal and there were two new strips – Roaring Wheels (a bland motor racing story) and Double Dynamite (an even blander sports yarn). This muted direction left the comic toothless and far less cutting edge and this is also reflected in the quality of the new strips introduced after the relaunch. They simply do not cut the mustard compared to the visceral approach in the pre-ban period. Jinx Jackson, The Loner and Double Dynamite are standard boy’s adventure strips that could be featured in any other contemporary comic. The edge had gone.
The comic rode the coat tails of previous popularity, but sales saw a gradual decline as once faithful readers left in droves. Action limped on for nearly another year until November 1977. Circulation figures had fallen by 100,000 to just 70,000 and so the title was merged with Battle.
Does Action have a legacy? Without a doubt it does. If Action had never been produced 2000 AD, the now last man standing of the once burgeoning UK comic scene, would simply not exist. After the controversy around Action Pat Mills moved, along with a considerable proportion of writers and artists, to his next project for IPC. Action had been a rehearsal room and breeding ground for talent and ideas that would blossom in the new science fiction themed comic. Conceptualised to cash in on the growing popularity of science fiction, 2000 AD would see familiar themes and tropes from Action transplanted under the cooling shade of science fiction. Mills realised that Action had been too realistic, too urban and that was part of the reason it had fallen. 2000AD would go on to publish equally graphic content and make as much controversial social commentary as Action (possibly even more so), but simply got away with it as the tabloids, watchdogs and governing bodies didn’t even have it on their radars. It was cloaked.
Was Action just a victim of a moral panic that can be seen as a precursor to the Video Nasties moral panic of the 1980s? In some ways yes, but the publication pushed the envelope with what had been seen in UK comics up to that period and did deserve some of the criticism levelled at it. With the passing of the decades Action can be seen as being akin to the UK comic scene as The Damned’s New Rose single was to the UK music scene, a vibrant cultural hand grenade that would send shockwaves through their respective industries and change them forever.
❉ Further reading: ‘For Action : The Story of a Violent Comic’ by Martin Barker, Titan Books, 1990 (ISBN: 9781852860233) is out of print but worth seeking out.
❉ Andrew Screen writes on things film and television by night and by day is a SEN practitioner with thirty years’ experience. He has written for Action TV and was editor of the magazine’s website for several years. His work has been published in Creeping Flesh Volume 1 and 2 (Headpress), The Sapphire and Steel Omnibus (Pencil Tip Publishing) as well as Horrified Magazine. Author of The Book of Beasts: Folklore, Popular Culture & Nigel Kneale’s ATV Horror Series (Headpress 2023).
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