After a successful stint working on various IPC girls' comics, Pat Mills had interviewed for the vacant position of managing editor at the company.

Mills felt the company's output had grown stale and outdated and told the board so, and wasn't offered the job due to his forthright criticism.

Despite internal friction from the bypassed staff the comic was a major triumph, and Sanders quickly moved to use them elsewhere in IPC's boys adventure division.

Kemp had a long history with the company, including a sizeable stint as assistant editor of Lion[3] (which he had helped update in the mid-1960s, being the driving force behind the introduction of the likes of anti-hero The Spider[5]) but was identified by Sanders and Mills as one of the staff most open to new ideas.

The pair were given three months to put the comic together from scratch; while Mills felt this was a "ridiculously short time", the more seasoned Kemp would later note it was the longest run-in he had ever known.

The pair quickly settled on a formula of taking extant story ideas, approaching them from a different angle and injecting a large amount of contemporary realism.

MacManus also handled running the letters column, taking on the persona of a put-upon dogsbody forever trying to avoid tyrannical editor Peg-Leg and have a cup of tea in peace.

So don't do a version of Oz or International Times, as much as I admire them, as that will have limited appeal to kids, but do a subversive equivalent of mainstream media culture.Doug Church worked as art director on the comic, as he had done on Battle.

He initially wanted to call it Action 76 and change the number incrementally to emphasise the comic's up to date nature, but this went down poorly with newsagents and the idea was dropped.

Having learnt of Action, IPC's rival DC Thomson brought out Bullet in response; however, produced by the same hands as Victor, Hornet and Hotspur it failed to make much of an impression.

As author Martin Baker has noted, the article itself was relatively balanced but the headline – "The Sevenpenny Nightmare", in reference to the notorious Victorian penny dreadfuls – set the tone for a campaign against the title's immorality.

The latter revolved around the supremely gifted but short-tempered Kenny 'Lefty' Lampton, a borderline thug whose off-the-pitch life rang more true than the kidnappings and assassination plots faced by Roy of the Rovers.

swapped out for "Death Game 1999", a highly violent lift of successful sci-fi film Rollerball, and in June trucking drama "Hell's Highway" replaced "The Running Man".

Self-appointed public guardian Mary Whitehouse and her NVLA – influential with the powerful tabloid press and Parliament – took a sojourn from trying to remove violence from television to begin campaigning against Action.

featured a version of present-day Britain where a disease suddenly killed off the world's adult population, leaving the country filled with tough gangs of teenagers fighting to survive, while "Look Out for Lefty!"

At the time football hooliganism was on a sharp rise and the press accused the comic of endorsing such behaviour, with noted referee Jack Taylor among those to supply condemning statements to the tabloids.

with a front cover – rendered by Carlos Ezquerra – featuring a bike chain wielding youth against a background of urban devastation, standing over what appeared to be the body of a policeman.

At the time the programme's main studio anchor was Frank Bough, who was – before his private life was revealed by the press to involve wearing lingerie for cocaine-fuelled orgies with prostitutes – one of the most trusted faces on television.

The precise reason for this step, unprecedented for a publisher that valued sales above all else, has been a matter for debate; Baker has speculated several factors combined to lead to the title being withdrawn.

[3] "Double Dynamite" and fellow post-suspension introductions "Jinx Jackson" and "The Loner" were described by Andrew Screen as "standard boy’s adventure strips that could feature in any other contemporary comic", and therefore proof that Action's "edge had gone".

[10] The new, safer Action failed to sell as well as readers swiftly realised it was largely the same as previous boys' comics and in November 1977 it was merged into Battle after sales fell to an unprofitable 70,000.

The following year portions of "Dredger" and "Hook Jaw" were included in the 224-page softback Big Adventure Book special, alongside reprints of the likes of "The Steel Claw" and "One-Eyed Jack".

[14][15] In 2017, Rebellion leased the rights to "Hook Jaw" to Titan Comics, who produced a five-part mini-series written by Simon Spurrier and drawn by Conor Boyle, and also published a collected edition of the Action strips to tie in with the series.

(by Ram V and Henrik Sarlström), "Hellman of Hammer Force" (by Garth Ennis and original artist Mike Dorey), "Hook Jaw" (by Quint Amity and Dan Lish) and "Dredger" (by Zina Hutton and Staz Johnson), as well as Henry Flint's "Hell Machine".

In June 2022 they followed up with a hardcover Battle Action Special with new stories featuring characters from both comics, all written by Ennis and with various artists, with new "Dredger" and "Kids Rule O.K."