Shouting The Odds - Part Five: Violent Actions!

By Regie Rigby

A long time ago, British comics were as yet untouched by the green Betlegeusean hand of The Mighty Tharg. The nineteen seventies were moving into their second dismal half and Britain was a dull, depressing place. A place of industrial unrest, strikes, serious lack of money, mullet hairstyles and bri-nylon shirts. A significant number of people thought that Garry Glitter was cool. As a nation, we were in a bad way.

It was 1976. We hadn’t even had Star Wars or The Sex Pistols yet. We were not prepared in any way for the glory that was Action. It really is hard to describe the effect this astonishing comic had on late seventies Britain. Now, don’t be confusing the British “Action” of the seventies with the American Superman comic of the same name. The British Action was a weekly anthology title, which lasted only a short time, but ruffled an awful lot of feathers. It was violent, it was crude, it was often in bad taste, and it was great. At least the Kids who read it thought so. Their parents were less sure.

There was a campaign, led by the Daily Mail newspaper (this will come as no surprise to British readers) to protect children from this “filth“. This breath of fresh air earned the tabloid moniker “The Seven Penny Nightmare” and became something of a cause celebre. The editor of Action appeared on what was then the Flagship BBC current affairs programme “Nationwide” and was ripped to shreds by the presenter. Action disappeared. It reappeared a few weeks later, a sanitised shadow of it’s former self, fans deserted the travesty in droves and Action faded away.

Now, I confess that I missed all of this. Action! was a star that burned very, very brightly but very very briefly indeed. Since I was born in 1971, I’d only just started school and I don’t think I even saw a copy when the comic originally came out. Once I did start reading comics in my late teens however, I very quickly became aware of the Action! legacy.

By now we were in the late eighties, and whenever you read whenever you read an interview with an up and coming new star in the firmament of British Comics, the name of Action! would come up in their list of favourite comics/major influences. I was intrigued, so I set out to find out more.

The real problem with Action from a modern collector’s point of view is that it’s really really hard to find old copies for sale. Action! was so reviled by the parents of its readers that many collections were disposed of by well meaning adults – which when you’re dealing with a medium which is widely regarded as disposable anyway is a particular bummer. Such is the affection in which it was held by its readers that any collections which have survived the rigours of parents, time, multiple house moves and years in a damp loft are cherished beyond any possibility of sale.

So, what was it about Action that caused such hatred amongst parents and yet such devotion amongst kids? Well, it’s a one-word answer really –

Attitude.

Prior to the explosion of Action, British comics had been terribly respectable, and indeed respectful. There was no shortage of Action and derring-do, as the fondly remembered adventures of such heroes as Dan Dare, The Steel Claw and Billy the Cat all capably attest. But these characters belonged to a particular tradition. In Dan Dare for example, it was always very clear that Dare was of the Officer Class and so fated for command, while his loyal batman (a now defunct position in the British Army occupied by NCO’s, whose sole purpose was to be the man servant for an individual officer) Digby was northern, working class and so happy with his lot.

By the mid seventies the Empire was over and irrelevant to your average comic reader in the street. They were contending with the appalling economic situation the country found itself in – strikes, power cuts and all manner of sundry inconveniences. The Britain in which the target audience of Action were growing up didn’t sit comfortably with the stiff upper lip of Dan Dare or the “Famous Five” style adventures of Billy the Cat.

A young freelance editor called Pat Mills could see the way the wind was blowing though, and when he was asked to come up with a new comic – something totally different – he took a bold step forwards. Rather than trying to imitate the comics already on the market, he took the time to see what was successful in other genres, and then produced strips accordingly.

Probably the biggest influence was Film. It was early 1976. The big movies of the last few years had been tough and gritty fare – the likes of Dirty Harry, Rollerball and of course the finest horror flick ever to splash across the screen, Jaws. Science fiction was still a pretty unfashionable genre, and it would be another year or so before George Lucas would unleash the wholesome fable of Star Wars.

Mills therefore took his influence from these hard-hitting, violent movie influences. Before Action police officers in British comics had tended towards the avuncular. Dredger changed that. A no nonsense, hard as nails detective who was not above breaking the rules to get the job done owed far more to Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry and ITV’s The Sweeney that he did to the traditional “Bobby on the beat” image of the good old British Copper.

The huge success of Jaws meant that Action got it’s own killer shark too - Hookjaw (so called because he had a hook stuck in his jaw – this might be genius, but it ain’t rocket science…) became very much the flagship character of the comic, probably because he so perfectly summed up the ethos of the publication. Unlike Spielberg, and Peter Benchley, who based their story around the attempts of a human hero to destroy the killer shark, the main character in Hookjaw was the killer shark. Sections of the story were told from the shark’s point of view, and there was no doubt that the readers would be often be rooting for the man-eater.

Nothing as good as this could last long, and Action soon fell before a barrage of moral outrage, whipped up by newspapers and an unfavourable item on the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Nationwide. For weeks there was no Action at all. When it finally did reappear, it was a pale shade of it’s former self – like a formerly aggressive Tomcat neutered by an overcautious owner.

Suddenly Hookjaw’s victims were snatched from the great white’s jaws at the last moment, kids started to respect their elders and authority figures in general became universally wise and benevolent. In other words the former rebel had put away the nail encrusted baseball bat, and started helping old ladies across the street. It was now no different than every other comic on the rack, and the once loyal cadre of fans moved on to find thrills and subversion elsewhere.

Many never came back to comics again.

Others found a new home amongst the pages of an upstart called 2000AD, which in many ways adopted the same formula as Action. Indeed, in the beginning I think it would be fair to describe dear old Tooth’ as “Action-Lite” – it was still violent and subversive and there are even some direct parallels which can be drawn between Action and 2000AD strips. Dredd is not all that different in style to Action’s resident Dirty Harry styled Dredger, and Action’s Death Game 1999 has much in common with 2000AD’s futuristic death match Mean Team. Tooth’ merely hid the subversion behind the curtain of science fiction and so avoided the moral outrage that so dogged its more down to earth predecessor.

Over the years Tooth’ has played around with its format, occasionally going through lean patches but all the time growing up with its audience and stubbornly refusing to fold. These days Tooth’ is riding a new wave of quality and as a long time reader I can tell you that it’s better than it’s been for ages.

But it still isn’t Action.

The many fans of Action, be they devotees from those heady days back in the seventies, or relative newcomers like myself still have an Action shaped hole in their lives. Until a couple of years ago all that remained for the fan was the odd rummage in the back issue bin, and Martin Barker’s excellent (but now sadly out of print) tome Action: The Story of a Violent Comic. (Remember that title, it’ll be important later…)

So, a while ago a bunch of interested people approached Egmont Fleetway, the (then) publisher of 2000AD with a view to getting Action revived. Sadly their approaches were rebuffed by David Bishop, who at the time was the serving Tharg and for the briefest of moments it looked as though that would be that.

But Action breeds its fans tougher than that, and so they banded together to do something themselves. The result was the small press marvel known to the world as Violent!. (It’s the story of an Action comic, d’ye see?). Violent!meister Mike Sivier tells me that :

”The idea was to make the stories short and sharp, maybe with a bit of
relevance, and with as much humour as possible.

Oh yeah, and we wanted to have fun! ”

Well, I can tell you that they’re certainly doing that – and so is the ever-increasing cadre of fans who have gathered around the black and white pages of this extraordinary feat of comics bravado.

Of course, Violent isn’t Action. The audience is older for a start, and so the sensibilities are more adult. But the spirit is the same. The attention to detail is the same, and the care taken with the scripting and the art is the same. The strips are often ever so slightly sick, but there is always a darkly humorous undercurrent that keeps everything the right side of offensiveness and gratuitous bad taste.

Violent holds fast to the black and white anthology format which was the only option back in the days of Action, and like Action, Violent isn’t afraid to draw its inspiration from characters and scenarios already popularised elsewhere. Also like Action, Violent takes these concepts and forces them into an entirely new and even more pleasing shape.

And so, amongst other thrills we have a deadly virus which turns humans into rabid cannibalistic fiends. We have a hard-nosed cop with a new and unwelcome partner. We have a cat nailed to a tree and a mob of vigilantes. We have magic, mayhem and the brutal murder of a giant panda.

I mean seriously – could anything be more fun than that?

Take a good look at the credits list too. Many contributors to Violent are actually pro’s. Frazer Irving, the cover artist for Issue #4, wielded the brush within the hallowed pages of 2000AD as the artistic brains behind such classics as Necronauts and the psychedelic Storming Heaven. Hell, he’s even been let loose on Dredd! Other Violent! contributors such as script writer Jim Campbell and Simon Fraser have also graced the pages of Action’s little brother (Fraser in particular was responsible for co-creating Nikolai Dante, to my mind the best new character to feature in ‘Tooth since the Rogue Trooper first dropped into the Quartz Zone).

Regular readers should be familiar with other names on the Violent! roster too. I’ve name checked Simon Gurr here before (and yes, he’s also worked for ‘Tooth, so maybe you can see a trend…) but I don’t think I’ve ever brought Peet! To your attention until now. He’s typical of the “amateur” crew of Violent! in that he produces quality expressive work which would look entirely at home in 2000ad. I’m pretty sure that Violent! is on the reading list for all the varied incarnations of Tharg, so I shouldn’t be surprised if he and the rest of the Violent! posse didn’t turn up in ‘Tooth before long.

So, rush out and buy a copy now – it is fair to say that Violent! is a reasonable representation of what the future talent of British Comics has to offer. If your local comics pusher isn’t enlightened enough to be keeping this little gem in stock you should berate them most severely and then send a cheque for £2.00 to:

Mike Sivier
19 Lon Cwm, Ithon Gardens,
Llandrindod Wells,
Powys
LD1 6BE

Who will be pleased to send you the latest issue. If you live outside the UK, swing by the Fool’s Errand’s board and let me know and we’ll see if we can get something sorted out.

Next week we have animation, Highwaymen and all manner of other stuff.

See you then.