Comic Cuts — 30 January 2026

The opening pages of Action: The Sevenpenny Nightmare

You'll be pleased to hear that I've had a far more productive week thanks to a lack of distractions (working out my tax returns, writing a book introduction, ignoring the need to rake up leaves in the garden and do some tidying up in the house). I'm 70 pages into the layouts and I'm in the thick of the newspaper controversies that surrounded ACTION: THE SEVENPENNY NIGHTMARE, the latter, of course, being one of the headlines the paper was damned with.

I'm working my way slowly through the text. I've made some choices about how the book should be laid out and I've gone back to a two column format similar to the LION: KING OF PICTURE STORY PAPERS book—apt as Geoff Kemp was editor of both Lion and Action. I picked the two column format over the one wide and one slim column format of the COUNTDOWN TO TV ACTION book because of the sheer number of footnotes. Over 250. This is a book where I'm quoting as many of the people involved as I can to build up an accurate picture of what happened as events approached the pivotal date of October 6th, 1976. Someone should set up a petition at Change.org to have that declared a bank holiday by the government.

Footnotes: I didn't want to put them at the end of the introduction because there were so many and anyone reading the book would have soon become tired of flipping back and forth in case there was information at the footnote rather than just a source citation. (I find this very annoying, so I've assumed that other people do, too.)

I've spent hours trying to recreate the poster! 

Having so many footnotes at the bottom of the page is also dictating how I lay the pages out, as I don't want to have to raise too many of them off the bottom margin. I've had to in a few cases, but only when I've had no other option—when I want to include an illustration that relates to the text on that page, for instance. 

I'm also running the pictures around the same size they were printed. In the past I've often been able to shrink down a page and still have the dialogue and captions legible. However, unlike the hand-lettered pages of, say, Lion, ACTION used tiny type-set balloons and to shrink them down would have made them unreadable. No good if you're trying to give examples of the use of language as well as the action of the artwork.

So I've not run many full pages as I've done in the past. That decision was partly made because I know that Rebellion are publishing the full run of ACTION's pre-cancellation issues in three volumes over the coming months. The first volume is to be released on February 25th. Not cheap, but cheaper than buying the individual issues!

Despite the comic being mostly black & white, I'm going to be printing in full colour. It adds to the price, but, again, I can't talk about "More blood, more blood!" without actually showing the red on the pages of Hook Jaw, can I? At a rough guess, I think the new book is going to be about the same size as the BEYOND THE VOID book about Badger Books that I did a couple of years ago. So we're looking in the ballpark of 170 pages and a price around £25.00.

Hopefully that'll give you some idea of what to expect. I'm looking forward to getting this one out. I'm something like 40% of the way through the introductory text, and then we'll have indexes to the issues, the creators and the contents of annuals of specials. When I realised that we were coming up for the 50th anniversary, I worked out a plan that meant I'd get the book out mid-February. Of course, the last book I did took longer than expected and I didn't get started on the ACTION book on time. What with Christmas and New Year, I'm now hoping to have the book designed by about the time Rebellion have their book out. Proofs and more proofs will add another month, but I should have finished copies in my hands in time for the Glasgow Swap Meet, which I'm planning to attend on March 21st.

(Now watch my carefully laid plans slide into oblivion!)