Review by Frank Plowright
Action has a legendary status among readers of British comics, at least those of a certain age. Reflecting the dissatisfaction of society in the 1970s, it channelled aggression and nihilism into serialised boys’ comics with the creators pushing at boundaries until it attracted the attention of the British press in 1976. Newspapers that habitually published photos of topless women pushed the moral outrage button and IPC executive John Sanders’ rebuttals about the comic having less violence than many films and TV shows aimed at the same audience were lost in the collective howl. Eventually Action was withdrawn from sale, only to return two months later in far less controversial form.
Its original incarnation is remembered fondly by a generation of comic creators who grew up in the 1970s and it’s fair to ask if Pat Mills would have gone on to create 2000AD without the experience of Action. Mills provides an introduction.
Volume 1’s 385 pages only cover the first ten weeks of publication. Two strips jumped on by the press were Kids Rule O.K, which isn’t seen, while only the opening episode of Look Out for Lefty appears. That’s not to say there’s not enough excitement to go round. Seven strips ran in every issue or almost every issue, and collections of some have already appeared. Follow the recommendation links for more detail, but Hook Jaw concerns a vengeful shark, The Running Man is an athlete unwillingly given plastic surgery to resemble a gangster, and Hellman of Hammer Force is a WWII German tank commander who’s no Nazi. The disparate selection exemplifies Action’s multi-genre brief.
Although the credits page may suggest Before the Ban runs a dozen consecutive chapters of a story before moving on to the next, the content is presented as per the original comics complete with covers and some promos. It has the benefit of not drawing attention to repetition in some cases.
Mills’ vision of resolutely ordinary British people is stamped by opening strip Dredger, an unconventional mercenary expelled from the marines for brutality, and scornful of establishment rules. Other features in the opening issue are Ron Carpenter and Angelo Torado’s The Coffin Sub concerning the haunted commander of a submarine raised from the ocean after all crew had died; John Wagner and Leopoldo Sanchez’s Blackjack, a boxer living under threat of going blind, and Carpenter and Barrie Mitchell’s Play Til You Drop about a blackmailed footballer. Sport’s Not for Losers by MacManus and Dudley L. Wynn completes a trio of strips about injured athletes, but along with Hook Jaw best exemplifies the violent route Action would take, with a scene of the co-star only just avoiding assault with a broken bottle.
It’s surprising there’s never been a complete collection of Dredger, a strip that’s creative action fun all the way through. However, the constant gleeful poor taste and violence of some strips is actually tempered by others being written to a formula by creators less imaginative than Mills, whose vision of the British working class can be further subverted by the surroundings provided by largely Spanish artists. Much here still stands up as readable melodrama, if not matching a perhaps impossible expectation based on reputation. The greater atrocities arrive in Volume 2.
