Forty years after the sudden demise of a popular 70s comic, David Barnett looks back at its shocking tales of football hooliganism, savage sharks and rampaging teenagers

Too much action: how kids' comic Action drowned in its own ultraviolence

Forty years ago this week, young readers were eagerly anticipating the latest issue of their favourite British comic, Action.



But the 37th issue never dropped through letterboxes. Facing a mounting wave of political and commercial pressure, the publishers IPC cancelled the title – even though that week’s comic, cover-dated 23 October 1976, had already been printed.

Almost 200,000 copies were pulled from distributors and sent to be pulped. Action was killed off in its prime.

But why? A print run like that would have today’s publishers salivating; according to Audited Bureau of Circulation figures released early this year, even the once mighty Beano barely tops 33,000 weekly sales.

But it wasn’t poor sales that killed Action – quite the reverse. Kids, especially boys, were lapping it up, and that was the problem: Action was too popular and too violent.

Strips such as Hook Jaw, about a savage Jaws-like shark; Kids Rule OK!, a post-apocalyptic thriller in which only teenagers survive; and Look Out For Lefty, which featured football hooliganism, caused moral outrage among adults, leading directly to Action’s ignominious demise.

“Action was a very important comic,” says launch editor Pat Mills. “It was modern, it was exciting, but, most importantly, it didn’t talk down to kids. It was about empowering them, about giving them stories where they had the power. They could relate to that. It wasn’t a comic where figures of authority were in control.”

Most comics aimed at boys at the time were war comics – Victor, Warlord, Battle, and the Commando pocket books. “IPC came to me and my brief was to create a comic that was as powerful as Battle,” Mills recalls, “but more so … They wanted to make it a really modern comic.”

So Mills took a look around. He saw punk rock and football terrace violence and Muhammad Ali and queues outside the cinema for Jaws. If Action was going to reflect the modern world, it had to reflect these things. So he set to work.

The British comics industry was quite a staid, safe environment at the time. “We must have seemed like a nightmare to these guys,” Mills smiles ruefully. “I told the management that I was going to do a story about a black boxer and they were horrified. They said the hero would have to be a white boxer, but perhaps he could have a black sidekick. I said, ‘Haven’t you heard of Ali?’”

The story did appear as Mills intended, as BlackJack, written by John Wagner. This being a comic aimed at boys, Mills also wanted a football story. Look Out for Lefty didn’t just tackle the action on the pitch, but the violence on the terraces.

Mills cheerfully admits that he took direct inspiration from the popular culture at the time. “Jaws was the big story, this incredible movie about a shark, a force of nature. And I wanted some of that, so we did Hook Jaw. But I didn’t want it to be like King Kong – I wanted nature to win!”

One remarkable thing about Action was that it was tacitly aimed at working-class children.

“The only time we saw working-class characters they were sidekicks, like Digby in Dan Dare, or they were figures of fun,” Mills says. “Even Alf Tupper, the Tough of the Track, was presented as this odd character who trained for his races in his pit boots and ate fish and chips as soon as he crossed the finishing line.

“Kids got what we were trying to do immediately. There was this whole culture of punk, of James Herbert books such as The Rats, of Richard Allen’s Skinhead novels … It was all edgy and different, and Action was definitely a part of that.”

Despite that, says Mills, the team putting together Action always had “a definite moral compass”. He says: “We weren’t saying, ‘Go and pick a fight on the terraces’, but we were showing that sort of thing happened, as kids already knew.”

Action launched on 23 February and immediately began to grab headlines, notably in the Evening Standard, which ran a piece headlined: “AARGH lives … but the blood is printed red.”

“See a youth murder five policemen,” the story continued, “see a body hurtle through a car window, see several limbs chomped off by today’s most modish monster, the killer shark. All this and more, some in glorious Technicolor, in the new British children’s comic called Action, second issue out today.”

The furore continued to mount through the spring and summer, until the magazine closed that autumn, after just 36 gloriously ultraviolent issues.

According to Mills, it was the story Kids Rule OK! that “got us banned”. Set in a world without adults where gangs of teenagers run amok, Mills acknowledges that it was a riff on Dave Wallis’s 1964 science fiction novel Only Lovers Left Alive. The final instalment featured a gang advancing on a cowering adult, a policeman’s helmet beside him on the ground.

The Sun branded Action a “sevenpenny nightmare” and the presenter Frank Bough tore a strip off IPC’s John Sanders when he appeared on the teatime news programme Nationwide.

“The hounds were baying for blood,” says Mills. A week after the Nationwide story, Action was debated in the House of Commons. Two of the UK’s biggest distributors told IPC they weren’t happy, with WH Smith rumoured to have declared that unless Action was axed it would refuse to stock any IPC titles.

Issue 37 was duly pulped, but some copies had already been sent to contributors and a few stored in the archives. If you’re lucky enough to have one, you’ll probably know that one sold last year on eBay for more than £2,500.

“I feel a great sense of loss for Action,” says Mills, who launched 2000AD for IPC a year later. Action returned briefly in sanitised form and was eventually merged with Battle.

It’s been gone for 40 years, but not forgotten. Mills and comic writer Kev O’Neill are writing a series of novels that fictionalise the Action episode; the first in their Read ’Em and Weep series, Serial Killer, is published next year. Titan Comics is publishing a brand new series of Hook Jaw, starting in December. And 2000AD’s current publishers, Rebellion, have acquired the rights and archives of a host of IPC titles.

They’ve just produced a collection of old strips from the girls’ comic Misty, and the odds are they’ll be blowing the dust off those old Action strips, so who knows? Once again the kids might rule, OK?