Action 50th Anniversary Special

In slotting its 50th Anniversary issue of the 1976 British comic Action into the calendar, Rebellion could have gone for the obvious hot spots: February to match the first issue's publication, or October to celebrate the high water mark of Action's notoriety and temporary withdrawal from sale by the publishers IPC, during a noisy round of bad publicity about the mix of violence and anti-social vibes the comic was brewing. Rebellion went for April instead, when the hook might have been the imminent raised profile of 2000 AD in the US through its distribution deal with Lunar.

Action and 2000 AD are joined at the historical hip, both originally products of the churning mass-production lines of the UK comics industry, shepherded towards similar audiences by people like Pat Mills and John Wagner. Rebellion owns the rights to Action and a tranche of other 1970s and '80s British comics, and has spent the last decade repackaging selections from the vaults; but whatever its goals for period whimsies like Fran of the Floods or The Leopard from Lime Street, it surely intends the Action IP to channel something different. It wants to summon up the raucous rowdy persona that once upon a time in the old country put the wind up the establishment and appalled some tea-time viewers of BBC One, while aligning current 2000 AD with those traits by association, an aura you can't wring out of Fran of the Floods no matter how hard you squeeze. Rebellion loves its adopted children equally; but Action is the special one.

Rebellion did mark the February date with Action — Before the Ban Volume One, a collection of the first dozen 1976 issues in full sequential order. It knows as well as anyone that the comic was never actually banned, although this fruitful legend has lasted 50 years and does yeoman service here again. Reading those archives alongside this 50th Anniversary Special for a direct comparison confirms that time's arrow goes only one way — and also that the new comic is a slight cheat. It features four strips from the old days revamped and updated for moderns, which in fact Rebellion has already been doing since 2020 in a sequence of smart, good-looking comics under the name Battle Action, resurrecting characters from the combined à la carte menu of the Action family under a range of creators, with Garth Ennis first among equals. Since three of the four series in the Anniversary special already feature in this Battle Action title, and in two cases the stories form a continuing narrative, the Anniversary comic is in every sense that matters another issue of Battle Action, rebadged to match the date and the vibes.

The newcomer making a first appearance in modern dress is Look Out for Lefty, a football (all right, soccer) strip whose depiction of fan aggro and hooliganism in 1976 was the rawest nerve contributing to Action's notoriety. Lefty here gets a revisionist makeover from writer Rob Williams, not unlike the one Williams gave Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell's old Red Dragon character in 2000 AD; which is to say working-class former soccer star Lefty Lampton is tipped into social distress and all his efforts in the past made to seem nihilistically pointless. Williams and artist Patrick Goddard do start from the exaggerated social commentary of the original — Lefty finds his beloved granddad dead and has him stuffed and mounted, which fits with the ribaldry of the 1976 strip where the old boy was putting dog food into his sandwich on page one — before spring-boarding from there into outright farce. While trying to take out his personal pompous class enemy, Lefty accidentally kills the King of the United Kingdom with a ballistic soccer shot right to the face, which is somebody's wish fulfillment but doesn't feel much like Lefty's.

Action's breakout star was Hook Jaw the man-eating shark, responsible for some of the most horrific sights the old comic had to offer if death by dinosaur or vagina dentata is your particular trauma. Writer Steve White already contributed one Hook Jaw story in Battle Action and here provides another, working marine science and ichthyology into the plot alongside a sweaty fetid Hispanic drug runner wearing the pornographer's uniform of Hawaiian shirt over Speedos and belly. Like Lefty, the strip massages the source material. In the old days Hook Jaw was usually minding his own business when some passing capitalists would barge in and get mulched; but now it is said that killing has become a drug and the shark is an addict, a more proactive but uncontrolled ecological force roaming an ocean now even more ruined. Staz Johnson enjoys himself drawing the shark devouring things — "An entrée of calamari, a main course of long pig" — and it's not his fault that the previous Hook Jaw story in Battle Action #3 was drawn by PJ Holden and John McCrea, a fairly electrifying combo that made Hook Jaw look almost McMahon-ishly abstract. But what should an image of horrific shark death in a comic even look like now? The strip was created in the image of Jaws, where as in all films the sights fly past and vanish. The tension in Hook Jaw caused by fixing the horrors permanently on the page was done deliberately, partly for gory fun-times and partly for the game of Putting The Reader Through It. A subversive act, and like all of those a political act as well, as the spluttering moral guardians of 1976 sensed perfectly well. Whether yesterday's subversions have any juice today in our time of self-destruction is a question Rebellion may ponder but institutionally declines to answer.

The last two strips are both by Garth Ennis, no stranger to putting the reader through it, the latest episodes in his ongoing control of both properties in Battle Action. Hellman: A Winter's Tale has Action's Third Reich tank commander on the Eastern Front in 1944, where the über-pragmatic Hellman is as usual the only man on the battlefield thinking clearly, a good man tipped into a stupid war surrounded by idiots but who will nevertheless blow the enemy to atoms. The revived Hellman has benefitted hugely from its original artist Mike Dorey returning and exploring an atmospheric mix of high contrast monochrome and grey wash, in this case for a story set in the snow; WWII as total negative space. As with Hook Jaw, it happens to be a less potent story than a previous episode in Battle Action when Hellman encountered his German countrymen tipping large piles of Jewish corpses into mass graves; but Ennis knows his way around the time-locked moods of the British war comic better than anyone.

And then there's Dredger, where Ennis is off to the races: a wildly hyperbolic secret agent yarn in which the working-class title character murders, maims and mutilates without hesitation while the posh spy masters in His Majesty's Government pick their noses and mock the proles. The sound of the writer giggling accompanies every page, as does Ennis' fascination with the body and its squidgy contents, while John Higgins draws large panels of mayhem and disfigurement plus some terrific moody night scenes. As a new mutation of an old pastiche of British TV cop shows like The Sweeney, it has the coarse charm of a dirty joke. As political too-late-capitalism death-cult travesty, it's not a patch on Ben Marra's Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. But then what is?

Over in 2000 AD Judge Dredd recently ripped someone's face off with a high-tech adhesive glove, and kicked someone else in the groin so that their entire spinal column shot out of their back. These are not the kind of sights that have been presented in that strip in recent times. Mike Carroll and Joe Currie's current series Silver is sci-fi rather than splatter-satire, but has a queasy suppurating atmosphere not aligned with 2000 AD's recent baseline. So perhaps, somewhere in the 2000 AD metabolism, the Action gene is stirring, now that Rebellion's period of explicitly calling to an all-ages readership has concluded. But that leaves just the regular old-age readers. Rebellion's core audience is former teenage boys tending a nostalgic flame for their original comics, and anything branded as Action has been made to scratch that existing itch. Everybody knows this, including the creators of this very comic. Rebellion presents Action material as if it was going to cause a ruckus again, right here and now, up yours Sir Keir Starmer and your centrist dogmas. It would be grand if Rebellion did indeed want to do that thing, but it won't do it like this.

The post Action 50th Anniversary Special appeared first on The Comics Journal.