Comic Cuts — 13 February 2026

I've just this moment realised that this will be posted on Friday the 13th. Fortunately, I don't suffer from paraskevidekatriaphobia – indeed, I was born on a Friday the 13th so I don't think of it as the slightest bit unlucky. I'm not a believer in such hokum. Touch wood.

There's good news on the ACTION front: I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I was on page 142 when I turned the computer off last night; a PDF copy of those pages was sent winging its way to someone who had agreed to do some proofing for me, and I've already had the first set of comments & corrections back. The pace has kicked up as I'm fast approaching the deadline for getting the book out by the time I get to the Glasgow Comic Mart on March 21st. I need to have the book finished and with the printer by the end of next week if I'm to squeeze in two proofs before doing a print run so I have books on sale at Glasgow on that day.

I will say now that I'm very pleased with the way things have gone with the layouts. I was a little worried that the choices I made early on would limit what I could do with the pages. There were design problems that needed to be considered. The book has a lot of footnotes, for instance, and a three-column format would mean a lot of thenm continuing in other columns and potentially on other pages. The practical solution was a two-column layout, avoiding putting pictures at the bottom of the page, as it would mean lifting any footnotes up above the illustration. Well, I've done that a couple of times, but for the most part I've taken advantage of pages/columns without footnotes. 

I'm also trying to make good use of the colour printing by including every cover from the original run (February to October 1976) and a lot of covers from the second run (December 1976 to November 1977). The black & white pages are almost all same size as they were originally printed because the typesetting was so tiny that the captions and balloons would be unreadable. I've shrunk a few pages, but usually only where two different versions are printed for comparison.

I may not be the world's greatest designer, but I'm thoroughly enjoying my work now that I've got into it. I'm dipping into strips that I loved when I was a kid. I have hugely fond memories of Dredger and The Running Man – I have always loved action thrillers with crime or spy backgrounds. I was also coming down from the loss of Top Secret Picture Library, which folded in February 1976, just as Action was launching. Nobody feels the loss of a comic they love more than a 13-year-old!

I mentioned last week that I was filling some gaps in my science fiction collection. I was reading sf seriously the year Action launched. I'd read a few things prior to that: the first two John Carter novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, some of the James Blish Star Trek novelisations, and quite a few Dr Palfrey novels by John Creasey, which I never thought of as sf as they were set on Earth. In March 1974, Speed & Power began reprinting stories by Arthur C Clarke and I was hooked. I think it was the summer of 1975 that I read everything in the library by Clarke and Asimov, was picking up Science Fiction Monthly, the poster magazine, and began learning about other writers and that sf magazines had a fifty year history.

I remember Clarke's book shop had a huge selection of sf titles and I was guided somewhat by mention of exotic-sounding writers from the pulps. One of the earliest books I bought (maybe the very first) was The Best of A E van Vogt (Sphere, 1974), with an introduction by Van Vogt from just as exotic Hollywood, CA, and one of the greatest opening of a story ever written: "The creature crept. It whimpered from fear and pain, a thin, slobbering aound horrible to hear. Shapeless, formless thing yet changing shape and form with every jerky movement. It crept along the corridor of the space freighter..." ('Vault of the Beast')

Fifty years later, I still have that book on my shelves. There's a bit of wear on the front cover and at some time over the past five decades I've creased the back cover, but it's the same copy I bought in 1975.

Now I need to read the rest of the story!