Britain's Banned Comic - the Action story

I remember it well - it was Valentine's Day 1976, but I wasn't in the least concerned with romantic matters. Hey I was eleven years old and at that age girls were just an annoyance who couldn't play football - come to think of it, nothing really changes. No I was more interested in a new comic book that was launching.

Of course we didn't know it at the time, but there was something different about Action. John Sanders, Pat Mills and Geoff Kemp were the men initially in charge of developing the comic for IPC who had scored a great success with Battle Picture Weekly and wanted something equally gritty but far more contemporary. The comic went by the name of DR Martins (a kind of boot favoured by teenage hooligans) for it's first few months of development before being changed to Action 76 and eventually Action.

And so it hit the shops - at first it seemed like any other British boy's comic and hardly original - cinema hits Jaws and Dirty Harry were ripped off in Hook Jaw and Dredger respective. There were the war strips, the sports strips and the adventure strips.  But unlike other comics the stories did for the most part depict the grimness of the 1970's streets - streets that the working class readership could identify with.

After only two issues the title gathered controversy - The Sun newspaper attacked the full colour blood in Hook Jaw and the extreme violence in other strips, under the headline The Sevenpenny Nightmare. The campaign against the comic intensified. Mary Whitehouse, leader of the Viewers and Listeners pressure group was appalled and appeared on several national TV shows complaining about the comic's violent content.

The outburst against the title continued and pressure built to such a level that W H Smiths and John Menzies, then the biggest distributor, decided that they would no longer stock the comic if the violence and content was not toned down. As a result Action was withdrawn from sale on October 23rd 1976.

When the comic returned in December the content and style had been considerably toned down to such an extent as to castrate the title. Gone was all the blood and gore and stories were full of much safer characters.

Sales went down almost immediately -  The comic limped on until it was merged into Battle Picture Weekly where it existed in name only until 1982 when Battle dropped the Action name, but by then Battle too was losing its way.


It's a shame Action hadn't been left alone to continue its development along the road of both gritty realism and OTT content. I often think it would have matured into something very special. After all no other comic would ever tackle the political issues of the day in well written adventure stories. It was all escapism at the end of the day and the anti-Action movement was, as always, ill informed and led by hysteria.

Below are several of the more iconic Action covers:

Reading is the new rock and roll

Reports are that there has been a spike in sales of children's eBooks, leading some to speculate that the electronic revolution is luring kids away from the TV's and computer games as they read books on their cool new devices. If these reports are true then this is indeed good news and bodes well for the future of the book, electronic or otherwise. And it's not only the children as adults also find these new fangled gadgets irresistible.

Though I suppose it's only logical that people should be reading at the moment. After all more and more are being enticed into buying eReaders, and after spending some pretty handy dosh on one of these gadgets the natural thing to do is buy a few eBooks. Maybe after the novelty wears off some of these eReaders will be stuffed into a drawer and ignored. But some no doubt, people who had gotten out of the reading habit, will be snared for life.

At the moment reading is being presented as cool - think of the flashy Kindle television advertising campaign and the way the product is being presented. All those cool and crucially youthful people reading. And it's not only the Kindle that is being pushed at the hip folk - Sony's excellent range of readers are advertised in lifestyle magazines. No stuffy, pipe smoking academics sitting by an open fire with a leather bound hardback on their knees. Reading's not about that any-more - reading is the new rock and roll.

And amidst all this reading, many publishers are running around like headless chickens instead of embracing the new medium. They are worried about the traditional  form of publishing vanishing, they are terrified of this new business model. Admittedly many have come around and are releasing their books in both print and electronic formats. Others like Leisure have gone the whole hog and now virtually publish all of their mass market books electronically. Eventually the eBook market will settle down and will generate income. I have no doubt that some of the larger established publishing houses will see their importance dwindle as the new upstarts take risks and produce books that will create their own market. Nothing can stand still forever and now is the time for experiment.

One of the most lucrative markets at the moment is in the Young Adult, or YA, genre, but then it's a pretty flexible genre and can (and does) encompass romance, horror, crime, comedy and pretty much everything else. It is also to this demographic that the various eReaders are being most vigorously pushed.

But at the end of the day, when all is said and done and not to put too fine a point on it, it's not really about the electronic gadgets. It's about the stories, the characters and the imaginary worlds. It's about writers giving readers want they want, which leads to some interesting speculation about what kind of fiction will boom next...your guess is as good as mine!

Those old westerns

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The Jack Martin website has been updated with the latest news on Delta Rose and the Tarnished Star movie.

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DC DROP COMICS CODE

The Comics Code of Authority was added to comics in the 1950's which indicated that the comic book followed the code's standards and often bizarre rules. However the code is now mostly redundant and  now DC Comics have said they will drop the code from their books come April and follow their own in-house standards.

Many believe the code was just a way to limit the comic-book field and eliminate dozens of independent companies that were flooding the market with horror and crime comics..

Risen - Film Review

The remarkable story of Welsh boxing legend, Howard Winston is served up in this award winning movie from Burn Hand Films. The story follows Howard from the time he lost three fingers in an industrial accident to him being crowned Featherweight champion of the world after beating Mitsunori Seki in the 1968 fight at the Royal Albert Hall. It truly is a life affirming story of grit and determination as the man who couldn't even make a fist with his right hand went onto rule the boxing world.

The part of Howard Winstone is taken by Stuart Brannan who also co-wrote the screenplay with director, Neil Jones and between them they have produced a grim, gritty but ultimately joyous film that fails to fall into the sentimental trap which is always a danger with sporting based movies. The film pulls no punches in telling it as it was and the grim surroundings of 1960's industrial Wales are brought to vivid life. There are some great character sketches and being a Welshman myself and a Valley boy too, it was pleasing to see characters that rang true on the screen. Boyd Clack, as Howard Winstone Snr gave a great turn as a man suffering from black lung disease, the curse of the coal miner, whose only desire is to help his son overcome all odds in his quest for greatness.

"A Valley's boy. The champion of the world. It's tremendous."

Howard Winstone is portrayed honestly, warts and all, and we see that his highly focused determination is both the making of him as well as the ruin of his marriage. Grainne Joughin plays Mrs Winstone and the actress has some powerful material to get her teeth into. She starts out positively joyous, almost girlish but hardens as her marriage becomes a soulless shell.

"What about what I want?", she pleads to her mother-in-law only to receive a stony look and words spat back with venom.

Though the bottom line is that  this is a boxing movie and it is in the fight scenes that it will ultimately be judged - Neil Jones obviously recognised the fact and he presents Winstone's various fights in several styles -from painfully slow to blurringly fast. The second fight against Vicente Saldivar is particularly effective - played out in grinding slow motion and set to Moonlight Sonata, it becomes a hypnotic ballet as the camera pulls back time after time to the rhythm of the boxer's feet. This is then contrasted by the third and final fight against the Mexican champion flashing across the screen with the speed of strobe lighting.

More Raging Bull than Rocky Balboa, Risen is a gritty story, the mood often as black as the coal fields but it is also a testament to the determination and sheer guts of one man who rises about adversity and handicap to punch his way to the top.

Following a triumphant journey around the festival circuit, Risen will begin a cinema release this April. It will be available on Region 2 DVD this May with other regions to follow shortly. It can be pre-ordered from Amazon now. And is destined for a knockout success in the home DVD market.

New York Times eBook bestseller list to launch this month

The New York Times Best Sellers lists for eBooks will launch online on February 11th and will be followed with a print publication in the Sunday February 13th issue.
James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge’s crime novel Tick Tock from Little, Brown, topped the fiction category as the No. 1 eBook Best Seller and the No. 1 combined print and eBook Best Seller.
Laura Hillenbrand’s WWII book called Unbroken from Random House is No. 1 on nonfiction list. This title also topped the combined print and eBook sellers list.
The Help by Kathryn Stockett, ranked higher in eBooks sales than eBook and print combined sales. The book is No. 8 on the eBook bestsellers list for fiction and No. 9 on the combined print and eBook Best Sellers list.
Other authors who made the top 10 lists include Stieg Larsson, John Grisham, and George W. Bush.