Hook Jaw

Titan Books are following up their Hook Jaw mini-series revival by Si Spurier & Conor Boyle with a reprint of the original strip from the pages of Action. The strip has been a popular choice for revival over the years: in 2007, Spitfire Comics reprinted the bulk of the original Action strip from the period before it was pulled from the newsstands. The Spitfire Comics book went to a second edition in 2009—although both editions were short print runs.

The new Titan edition, at 136 pages in hardback compared to Spitfire's 96-page softcover, will presumably reprint more of the story as it appeared in the revived Action and, one hopes, some introductory material. The cover credit to writers Pat Mills and Ken Armstrong and artist Ramon Sola, seems to ignore the work of the strip's other artists, as did the Spitfire edition.

A colour version of the strip appeared in the 2011 John Freeman-edited Strip which ran only a handful of issues, although the coloured strip was also published digitally by Egmont and via Sequential. However, Hook Jaw was not part of the relaunched Strip in 2013.

Hook Jaw by Pat Mills, Ken Armstrong & Ramon Sola.
Titan Books ISBN 978-1782-76804-3, 12 September 2017, 136pp, £20.00 / $34.99. Available from Amazon.