Lights, comics, ‘Action’!: ‘2000 AD’ precursor mag returns with 50th anniversary issue

If you’re a 2000 AD fan, we’ve got a genuine case of good news, bad news.

So, which do you want first?

Just kidding, it’s the bad news: You have to wait yet another week for the fourth edition of our Adventures in Thrill Power column. We apologize for the delays, but Tharg is sort of a diva to work with and often relies exclusively on messenger pigeons.

The good news, then, is that we’ve got a bit of a stop-gap right now in the form of a very special interview with four big-time creators about an equally thrilling and important new anniversary issue. Because before there was 2000 AD, there was a little rag called Action.

Debuting in 1976, Action served as a kind of prototype in all the most important ways, blending the same bonkers comics madness with thoughtful social commentary. However, Action quickly came to the attention of conservative activist Mary Whitehouse, who helped launch a movement of censorship across the UK. Whitehouse and her ilk eventually got their way when the public lost it over “Kids Rule OK,” which depicted a teenager assaulting a police officer. A so-called “safe” version of Action returned to the shelf shortly thereafter, but a lackluster response saw the publication fold by 1977. By February of that same year, however, 2000 AD had already started up, and the rest, they say, is history…

(Rebellion, the fine folks who publish 2000 AD, recently released Before The Ban – Volume One. It not only features reprints of Action‘s most famous work/columns, but it offers some insight into the magazine’s development and downfall. It’s definitely worth of your reading energies.)

Of course, if you hadn’t already figured out by the many clues within this piece, Action wasn’t entirely relegated to history’s dustbin. (In recent years, Rebellion has released several special commemorative issues for Battle Action, which was a short-lived combo of two existing titles.) Instead, the magazine gains new life with The Action 50th Anniversary Special. Featuring a star-studded collection of comics creators, the special features new stories from some of Action‘s most famous characters. And while the creators and storylines may be new, the Action Special proves ready to “inspire a whole new generation to anarchy!”

The Action Special‘s four stories are as follows:

• Dredger, “After The Action” (Garth Ennis and John Higgins): Here, “Britain’s deadliest secret” seeks out sweet vengeance for his fall partner. But who will break first, Dredger or the entire city of London?
• Hook Jaw (Steve White and Staz Johnson): The “killer shark with no regard for human life” is back at it again versus a cabal of drug dealers sealing their wares on international waters. You’ll need more than a life vest to survive!
• Hellman of Hammer Force (Garth Ennis and Mike Dorey): Panzer commander Kurt Hellman and his armored unit battle soviets amid the chaos of winter. You’ve never seen a tale from the Eastern Front quite like this one.
• “Look Out For Lefty” (Rob Williams and Patrick Goddard): Kenny “Lefty” Lampton makes good on his nickname with the finest feet in all of football. But as he tries to make a comeback, will Lefty’s foot guide his team to victory or is it back to the sidelines forever?

With the Action Special out stateside this week (May 13), we decided to gather most of the creators (Johnson, Ennis, White, Higgins, and Williams) for a little roundtable. Among many other  topics, we touch on their respective relationship with the OG Action, what makes the magazine so important, adding to the legacy in their own unique ways, how controversy informs storytelling, and even a future of even more Action stories. It’s a deeply interesting read about one of comics’ more intriguing “sagas,” and proof that good stories will always win out over short-minded weirdos.

And stay tuned next week (May 19) for Adventures in Thrill Power #4!

AIPT: Did you have a relationship or association with Action heading into this special? How’s it feel personally to get to contribute to something like this, a project that’s both firmly at the core of 2000 AD and very much anti-censorship?

Staz Johnson: I was a fan of the original comic. I was 11 years old when it appeared, so getting stories that were as violent as the films I wasn’t old enough to see in the cinema made it immediately appealing. I was lucky enough to contribute art to a Dredger strip in a Battle Action special a few years ago, but luckily for me, this time I managed to land the big one…literally!

Garth Ennis: I only knew the Action characters as a kid from reading Battle Action, the title that resulted when the cancelled Action was folded into its older stablemate, the war comic Battle. For the past four years, I’ve been involved with the revival of Battle Action, for which I’ve written several of the original characters (most notably Hellman and Dredger). The Action Special is being published specifically to celebrate 50 years since that title began.

Steve White: My professional relationship with Action extended only to writing a Hook Jaw script and doing the cover for Battle Action #3 last year, which I think would be regarded as a separate entity to the Anniversary Special we’re discussing here. However, on a personal level, I had a great love of Action going back to buying the first issue when it was released; I was 11 or 12 at the time. It was the first comic I followed religiously, so, half a century on, it’s amazing to find myself part of this celebration.

John Higgins: I never had any relationship with Action in its controversial early days as a reader. I think I might have got one short story in Battle Action when it was amalgamated. I was concentrating on trying to get in to 2000 AD as an artist, [with] SF being my passion then and it still is.

Rob Williams: I wouldn’t say Action is anti-censorship, per se. It’s a comic that pushed boundaries and created an uproar in the 1970s as a result, that caused censors to come down hard on it. 2000 AD‘s maxim was always to deliver “thrill power,” and Action was a forebear of that. It was comics storytelling that looked to shock you and definitely raise two fingers to authority. It’s exciting to carry on that tradition.

AIPT: What can you tell me about your story/stories that you contributed? Given that they’re “iterations of classic stories,” what do you emphasize to capture the Action “spirit”?

SW: The elevator pitch is that a Mexican drug lord hires-by-force a shark specialist to help the cartel boss recover a shipment of his merchandise from the seabed where the killer shark Hook Jaw is making the situation difficult. Carnage ensues.

With this story, it was back to “shlockjaw.” Nothing too clever – just plenty of people, mostly bad guys, biting (no pun intended) the dust at the hands of our anti-hero. The “classics” largely followed the same outline: the human antagonist (oil baron, resort manager, etc.) ignores the shark threat and allows people, to quote Hooper in Jaws, to be served up as a hot lunch. The hero battles both greedy boss and ravenous shark. I tried to follow that basic trope.

SJ: I drew the Hook Jaw strip, and beyond the thrill of drawing an unfeasibly large Great White, it’s nice to see that old Hooky has managed to maintain his rather anthropomorphic sense of morality by making sure it’s only the bad guys who come in for his special attention.

GE: It’s always a pleasure to write Hellman and Dredger. Hellman was originally presented as being an honorable German solider who always fought fair, and while that’s something I can’t believe in to any great extent, I can focus on the other important aspect of the character: the ultra-competent tank commander dealing with the horrors of the Russian Front. Dredger, meanwhile, is an amusing celebration of uncouth manners and disdain for the establishment, and as such is probably the most direct representation of the Action ethos.

JH: As the artist working on Dredger, my part is relatively straightforward, sticking to the script. I trust Garth, having worked with him many times in the past.

RW: In “Look Out For Lefty,” we’re telling the story of a rebellious footballer who was always getting into trouble for one thing or other. In this latest story, he sets up a charity football match to help a struggling non-league club, and the King of England agrees to attend. Given Action‘s past history, you’ll guess that this Royal encounter doesn’t exactly go as planned.

AIPT: Do you have any favorite standouts from Action, or even just a sense of why it might have been so pivotal and influential

RW: Action was a lot of the same creators who would go on to build 2000 AD. Pat Mills, especially, who would write classic characters like Nemesis The Warlock and Slaine. It has a lot of the same punk energy DNA. And it was a kids’ comic, don’t forget. “Kids Rule OK” had a plague kill all the adults in the world and the children turning into hyper-violent gangs. Hook Jaw had the scares and gore of a Jaws. This was a comic that was rewiring minds back in the 1970s. It had a big effect on the British comic creators that would’ve read it, and 2000 AD and followed in its footsteps in the 1980s, like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison and company.

JH: For me it has always been the quality of writing and art. The writers in particular where pushing boundaries, the artists used were always at the top of their game. It just shrieked quality.

SW: Hook Jaw was first and foremost for me. I think it was probably the first character, such as he is, that I actively loved. I still have a strong muscle memory of reading those issues as a boy especially the huge disappointment of it first disappearing from the shelves then the intense frustration at the sad, pallid, bloodless thing that resurfaced. I abandoned the new Action very quickly, but those early issues really stayed with me. I’ve been asked why the comic was significant to me, and to its fans in general, several times.

Speaking for myself, I can ascribe it to the effect of seeing Apocalypse Now as a young boy who snuck into the cinema one Sunday afternoon when I was 14. I grew up as a British boy watching 633 Squadron, The Dam Busters, and The Bridge on the River Kwai; all very :stiff upper lip, giving the dastardly hun what for.” There’d be some mild allusions to the horrors of warm but by and large, it was dollops of glamorous heroism. Then I saw, alone, Apocalypse Now, and my mind was just blown. The one scene where the G.I. is screaming in pain while the medics work on him traumatized me deeply.

My point is, I’d grown up reading the likes of The Victor and Lion, etc.; boys comics that very much towed the cultural and social line. Then I picked up Action and you’ve got the likes of Hellman of Hammer Force and “Kids Rule OK” that utterly flew in the face of everything that had gone before me. I suspect there were a great many other boys (I don’t imagine Action had a big female following) felt the same. Here was a comic that spoke to us – sort of like a teenage Fight Club for aspiring British comic fans. Action didn’t talk down to you. Didn’t pull any punches, usually quite literally. It certainly didn’t pretend that violence didn’t have horrifying consequences. I suspect it also spoke very eloquently and loudly to boys of a certain age who just loved blood and guts.

GE: The two stories that I write are my favorites, although I’m also partial to a bit of Hook Jaw. Action was crucial in the development of British comics’ new wave; the lessons learned from its creation and demise allowed Pat Mills and his fellow writers and artists to make 2000 AD the success that it was. A great deal more followed from that, most obviously the generation of Brits who came to American comics — their work ultimately then leading to the creation of Vertigo.

SJ: For me, Hook Jaw was always #1 — partly because when Action appeared, I was obsessed by the movie Jaws and Great Whites seemed to be everywhere in pop culture at that time, so getting a weekly installment of a big shark doing what (we as 11-year-old boys assumed) they were born to do was priceless. Second was Death Game: the movie Rollerball had achieved a somewhat mythical status in the school playground as supposedly being ultra violent, and we as readers of Action were getting our own version, which as it turned out was way more violent that Rollerball ever was.

AIPT: It’s been 50 years since the book was shelved due to controversy. Do you think people’s sensibilities have changed, and is a book like this just not as “edgy” as it once was?

JH: To a certain extent, the rest of the world has caught up, well shall we say, the thinking world. I think there are still people who need to have the finger pointed at them. Intolerance, prejudice, and many “-isms” sadly are even more strident now than back then! Action and similar comics seem more relevant in showing, in an entertaining way, “the emperor has no clothes!” We are first and foremost an action-adventure comic; it has to be a fun and entertaining read first, [and] if we can make people think along the way also, that is brilliant.

SW: I think Action was indeed one of those nexus points in time. I really don’t think it could happen now. It would be easy to invoke “woke,” but I think that would be lazy and I don’t think that has much to do with it. Since the release of Action, there’s been seismic changes in pop culture, including the likes of the Satanic Panic caused by video nasties in the ‘80s, the arrival of the digital age, and the internet, etc. I don’t necessarily believe children of an Action-reading age these days are more inured to violence, which is why the comic was deemed controversial. I suspect most kids, and boys in particular, enjoy blood and gore and now, through the medium of computer games and such, have a greater accessibility to it (despite restrictions to prevent that). But I also think, at least in the UK, comic culture is nothing like it was in 1975. I think the notion of what could be conceived as “edgy” now would be utterly different, and on a prosaic level, you also need to look at who is actually buying comics. It’s a pretty different audience now.

RW: I doubt it’s possible to shock in the same way that Action did on its initial release. This is a very different world. I do think you can still tell excellent stories in its tone though. We have Garth Ennis and John Higgins on Dredger. In the previous Action special we did, Brian K. Vaughan wrote a “Kids Rule OK” story. We’re not short of top class talent here.

GE: In half a century, I think it’s inevitable that sensibilities change. That said, I’ve always detected a certain prudish conservatism in some comics readers’ tastes on both sides of the Atlantic, so I’d say the tendency to behave like a boring, finger-wagging maiden aunt is alive and well. Makes no difference to me either way.

AIPT: Similar to that last question, I’m wondering how you achieve that Action-level of “overt conspiracy” in 2026? Is that even something you actively try to accomplish to match the mag’s spirit or essence? Or, does depth come from not caring about controversy?

GE: The latter. You focus on story first and foremost, and you go where the narrative naturally leads you. Following any other impetus will get you nowhere interesting.

SW: I think this might be over-thinking what Action is. I’d call its stories “high concept” that borrowed heavily from the pop culture zeitgeists of the time then told those stories in a straightforward but brilliantly entertaining manner – I think that’s why they stayed with so many readers. Referring to my previous comment, I also think you need to look at who’s buying the likes of the anniversary issue; it’s not seeking to the rock the world of teenage boys; I would think it is seeking to appeal to the “inner lad” of the grown-up fans who want a nostalgic flavor of the original comic. I don’t think they’re interested in recovering any sense of “overt conspiracy” or reinventing the storytelling wheel; they just want to see what terrible ways Hook Jaw is going to devour someone this issue.

RW: If it’s an Action story, I’d suggest there should probably be something anti-establishment in the thematics or the delivery somewhere.

SJ: I suspect the readership of this Special isn’t going to be children, so in that sense there’s no need for controversy surrounding it. But I don’t think people’s sensibilities have changed all that much, they’ve just moved on from worrying about what effect a comic might have on children to worrying about what effect the media that children do consume these days (i.e., games, social media, etc.) has.

JH: I trust the writers and the editing, so I have no problem if the script courts controversy, I believe in the team I work with.

AIPT: Action also has a more “grounded” feel in terms of how it explores culture and wasn’t primarily about sci-fi/trigger-happy Judges. How does that inform how you approach storytelling and really doing something bloody and potent with “less”?

JH: Ha ha! Sorry, I was just thinking on most everything Garth has ever written, I never feel he ever writes anything but “more!”

SW: Not to sound combative, but I think that might be doing 2000 AD something of a disservice. I think it’s been noted on numerous occasions that Judge Dredd in particular very much had its finger on the pulse of social and cultural changes. You only have to look at the likes of Judge Dredd: America to see that. Maybe stories in Action — like “Kids Rule OK” — might be reflecting society at the time; maybe the prevalence of football hooliganism at the time, I don’t know.

As I mentioned before, Action was simply taking elements of pop culture (e.g., Rollerball as the basis for Death Game 1999 and very obviously jumping on the Jaws bandwagon with Hook Jaw). But I think it’s only with the passing of time and the response by the moral guardians who took such exception to Action that we can understand how and why the comic left such a mark. With that in mind, when I was writing the Hook Jaw stories, it was would have been easy to do “less” and just have lots of people being eaten alive by a craven great white, but shark science has come a long way since 1975. Garth, as curator, wanted me to reflect that — but, at the end of the day, it was still on with the body count.

GE: 2000 AD’s sci-fi approach was very much a response to the backlash against Action. The idea was to disguise what was being done with science-fiction and fantasy. So violence enacted by an authority figure (Dredd) was deemed by reactionary observers to be excusable. Violence suffered by robots and aliens was fine, too; they aren’t people. As Kevin O’Neill (I think) said to some busybody, ‘No, those aren’t people being killed, they’re cyborgs. Nothing to worry about. Take my word for it…’ Otherwise, I don’t think Dredger, Hellman, Hook Jaw, and Lefty represent less of anything.

AIPT: Would you like there to be another Action special down the road? Were there another such Action special, do you have a story in mind already? 

GE: There’ll be more Battle Action, featuring more of the characters from both classic titles. In fact Rob, Paddy, myself, and others are hard at work on it now.

JH: I think Garth has a number of Dredger ideas, as long as he does, I certainly hope to be there to do them with him!

SJ: I definitely hope this special is popular enough to warrant another edition, & I’d certainly be up for another bash at Hook Jaw, or Death Game, Dredger, Hellman, etc.

SW: I loved doing these issues, and I do indeed have something in mind…

RW: I think all of us would be excited to do more. Maybe we can get banned.