Review by Frank Plowright

Unlike the changing creative rosters of the two previous Battle Action Force collections, Axis of Evil is the work of a very limited selection of people. Primary writer Gerry Finley-Day writes everything, although using a number of aliases to fool readers, while artist Vanyo who draws everything is another alias. Spanish brothers Eduardo and Vicente Vañó Ibarra combining on pencils and inks.

There’s progression again from World in Peril as the serialised stories become ever longer, to the point where this volume features just three of them. By now Red Shadows and their allies are threat enough, and Baron Ironblood, so prominent in the earliest material, has disappeared. It’s the final transformation from the fantastic into out and out modern warfare, allowing for the occasional technological leap.

However, longer stories enable Finley-Day to retreat to a comfort zone. Instead of the invention applied to the shorter work in the previous volume, the length means there’s never an end in sight, the action perpetuated until a sudden climax. ‘Desert Strike’ supplies almost half the comic content, and seems to end only when a list of assorted desert perils has been exhausted. The same formula is then applied to a jungle setting. To be fair to Finley-Day, his brief was to perpetuate the action, and young boys of the 1980s thrilled to material whose shortcomings and repetition are only revealed by a collection. Week by week these are acceptable action episodes characterised by a gruesome turn of mind when it comes to supplying enemy deaths. While not explicitly drawn, the youngster of the 1980s thrilled to the bad guys being squashed under tanks, ejected from planes without a parachute and executed by sword.

Vanyo’s art is exemplary in telling a dynamic story featuring multiple characters and requiring vehicles used by land, sea and air forces. There’s plenty to see in every panel of their three page allocation, and a vitality to the action.

These collections have been admirably thorough in tracking down the assorted Battle Action Force material outwith the comics, although not quite as diligent in explaining the origins. After the three serialised stories and before the cover reproductions there are forty pages of text and illustrations spreads where a single picture is accompanied by a few hundred words explaining what’s going on. They’re an excuse for a sensationalised illustration, but patently filler.

It leaves Axis of Evil as a collection of functional stories serving their purpose in the 1980s, but without the quality to appeal to anyone other than nostalgic readers. This isn’t circulated via online booksellers, but is available to comic shops and from co-publisher Total Toy Books.