Action: The Sevenpenny Nightmare – Acknowledgments

Action - LeftyFirst and foremost, my utmost thanks to Martin Barker, Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Aberystwyth, and author of Action – The Story of a Violent Comic. Martin very generously gave me permission to reproduce sections of his work without limitation, or to put it another way “feel absolutely free to quote from the Action book in any way you want”. Thank you, I have. Martin has also donated a lot of his time to provide me with the original survey material regarding Action from his 1989 book Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics. Martin’s input has been invaluable to the creation of this site and I can’t tip my hat to him enough.

Special thanks to Rufus Dayglo for his collection of original pages and long lost covers, and for being such a damned good egg in locating a copy of the 23rd October 1976 issue. Since I started all this back in January 2004, Rufus has achieved the recognition he richly deserves for his fine artwork, and has gone on to work with some of the best in British comics.

Thanks also to the heirs to IPC for not stopping me from doing this, although they may have just ignored my original e-mail to them, Egmont have never opposed this site, and as it has grown, I have received the unofficial support of Steve MacManus and Melanie Leggett from Egmont’s legal department. Action is of course, now © Rebellion, the owners of 2000AD.

Also credit to those few people who have ever put anything at all from Action onto the internet. As I began work on this site, my own collection had only just emerged from the loft at my parents’ house after more than 25 years stuck in an old box going yellow. In those early days,  I would have been unable to include covers for the first ten issues and for the October 23rd issue without the efforts of 26pigs.com and Big Al at comicsuk.co.uk. Luckily, my collection is now back in rude health, thanks to many hours spent trawling eBay for replacements.

Finally thanks of a personal nature go to Simon Ashford, an old friend who I have not seen in decades, who showed me the very first issue back in February of 1976 which got me hooked, to John Pearce, another school friend who replenished my depleted collection for a small fee, and to my parents, who not only let such a thing as Action into the house every Saturday morning, but paid for it too. True, there was the whole Action burning phase in October of that year, but when I secretly replaced my whole collection and hid them, no-one looked too hard to find them.

Moose Harris

The Copyright Stuff

Action was originally © IPC Magazines Limited 1976. The comics division of IPC was sold to Fleetway, who were bought out in turn. All characters, distinctive likenesses thereof, artwork and text are currently © Rebellion, who bought the title and its characters from Egmont in 2016, and used with permission of the publisher.

Bullet and related images are © DC Thomson Ltd.

Action – The Story of a Violent Comic by Martin Barker © Titan Books 1990. The text from Action – The Story of a Violent Comic © Martin Barker 1990, reproduced here with the author’s kind permission.

The name The Sevenpenny Nightmare is taken from an article published in The Sun newspaper on April 30th 1976. Relevant images and quotes from The Sun,  Daily Mail and Evening Standard are © their respective publishers and are reproduced here with permission.

Text © Moose Harris 

ACTION™ REBELLION PUBLISHING LTD, COPYRIGHT © REBELLION PUBLISHING LTD, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.