Action: Before The Ban - Volume 1

by Ken Armstrong, Pat Mills, Tom Tully

Kindle Edition

Published February 18, 2026

About the author

Ken Armstrong, who joined ProPublica in 2017, previously worked at The Marshall Project and Chicago Tribune, where his work helped prompt the Illinois governor to suspend executions and empty death row. His first book, Scoreboard, Baby, with Nick Perry, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for non-fiction. He has been the McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

Reviews

[Joe Stunner · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the uninitiated, Action was a 1970s boys adventure comic that was so violent in its story-telling, and so graphic in its art-work, that it was eventually banned following the Mary Whitehouse-flavoured outrage of the time's self-appointed, moral vanguard.

Created by Pat Mills and Geoff Kemp, many stories was basically cribs of popular films of the time - Hook Jaw for Jaws, Dredger for Dirty Harry, etc. - with a couple of sports stories (football and boxing), thrown in for good measure. Other legendary comics' names who contributed were Gerry Findlay-Day, Carols Ezquerra, John Wagner, Steve McManus, and Massimo Belardinelli, all of whom would join Mills in his next IPC venture, 2000AD.

This book compiles the first twelve issues of Action, and while there's plenty to admire here, the best was yet to come. Brace yourself for Hook Jaw's Paradise Isle showdown with Rick Mason and Dr. Gelder, plus the Rollerball rip-off of Death Game 1999, the latter a tale of such desperation, savage violence and mercilessness, that it's a miracle Action ever made it beyond a six-month life-span.

Why not set the table with this first three months? You'll be desperate for the next three.

Thoroughly recommended.