I've blogged about IPC's late lamented Action comic here before (see this link for example) but what I didn't have until recently was the house ad for the first issue. Here it is, as it appeared in some of IPC's other weeklies, as one of those four-page pull outs that always whetted the appetite. This particular one appeared in Whizzer and Chips dated 7th February 1976.
...and the cover of Action No.1...
5 comments:
I love these adverts and inserts Lew. Battle and Action were IPC's first new(as in new material) launch since Thunder and they ushered in a wave of new comic from IPC.
Don't forget Jet, which came shortly after Thunder. Although both were old fashioned comics compared to the more energetic Battle etc. It's a shame the old guard at IPC didn't like the new wave of comics created by Pat Mills and John Wagner but Battle had a long run and 2000AD is still around 39 years later, so that says it all really.
The old guard didn't like the new stuff, but had little choice, the next three comics created were by the 'new guard' 2000ad, Starlord and Tornado. The new Eagle may have been more to the company's ideals, but was edited by Wagner and Mills Battle editor of choice Dave Hunt.
Looking back over the missed opportunities at IPC, If Starlord had been the adult orientated monthly, if Zajaz had made it as a more mature version of 2000AD, if Scream was allowed to live a little longer, if Nick Landau had gotten Mekomania off the ground and if David Lloyds Fantastic Adventure was chosen instead of Mask, would the UK comic market be different now?
Just as Battle and 2000AD and Roy of the Rovers showed that there was a big market for then 'niche' readerships, could Starlord have survived as an 'adult' monthly, alongside 2000 AD? Pointless speculation but still fun!
Those gents really did catch lightning in a bottle with 2000AD, but I would have loved to be around when all those action titles from IPC and DC Thompson were coming thick and fast. I was more of a humour kid in the early 80s, Beezer, Topper, Beano, Dandy and all that other good stuff, but once I discovered 2000AD in '86, I realised there was also another, very different world deserving of my pocket money. I still haven't got round to buying the History of Action book- schoolboy error... this post clinches it, going to put it at the top of my list.
I think yours was the path that most 80s kids took, CZX, with adventure comics seen as the next step up from humour titles. A situation arising from the division of humour and adventure comics in the seventies. I suppose my generation of the sixties were lucky in that most comics contained a mixture of humour and adventure strips so I always treated them equally. And as comics such as Smash! and Pow! also contained Marvel reprints amongst the new UK humour and adventure strips we were exposed to those at an early age too. On the downside, having discovered such exciting, dynamic comics so young, I never bothered with the DC Thomson adventure titles in the sixties as they seemed so dull compared to the Marvel reprints.
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