Publisher: London Editions
First issue: January 1990
Last issue: November 1990
Issues: 6
One might be forgiven for saying that British reprints of DC comics never really came close to matching the 70s and 80s success of their Marvel counterparts. This particular one was a bimonthly anthology title that didn’t last nearly as long as it deserved given the quality of its contents, chiefly Animal Man and New Teen Titans. Plus the text features were great, as I recall.
It’s a hefty comic, too, at 68 pages per issue on decent-quality paper and card-stock covers. It even has the words “graphic album” tucked away in the bottom-right corner of the cover as an indicator that this is no mere flimsy run-of-the-mill comic!
On the negative side, DC Action! was expensive, with issue #1 costing 175 pennies (2.57 pence per page) at a time when 2000AD cost 40 pennies for 32 pages (1.25 pence per page).
And, as I said, it was bimonthly. There are two kinds of bimonth: the first kind means it happens two times a month, and the other kind means it happens one time every two months. Sadly, DC Action!‘s publication frequency was of the latter variety. It seems a tad optimistic to expect the readers to wait two months between issues of a reprint title when they could just go to their local comic store and buy the original comics out of the back-issue bins. Readers of British comics were used to getting their new issues every week, not every eight weeks.
(Around the same time, London Editions also published a second DC reprint anthology, Zones, which was aimed at slightly older readers, and was also an expensive bimonthly graphical bum. It ran from April 1990 to October 1990 for four issues, and reprinted The Shadow, Swamp Thing and Wasteland.)
It’s a real shame DC Action! didn’t take off. One could argue that had it been launched a decade earlier — when the original US editions of the comics were harder to find on this side of the puddle — it might have really soared.
But then… there actually was a British-published DC comics reprint anthology title published a decade before DC Action!… The Super Heroes Monthly, also published by London Editions, ran from September 1980 to April 1982. It lasted for nineteen issues (twelve issues in volume #1, seven in volume #2), many of them with brand-new painted covers specially commissioned from UK-based artists such as Alan Craddock, Garry Leach and Bryan Talbot.
And a decade earlier than that, running from 1969 to 1970 — and predating Marvel UK by a couple of years — Thorpe & Porter’s imprint Top Sellers published the reprint anthology Super DC. It lasted for only fourteen issues, but it spawned a hardcover annual that came into my possession some time in the late 1970s (I think), and which was the subject of one of the first reviews ever to appear on this blog: Super DC Bumper Book. (Thorpe & Porter also “published” the notorious “Double Double” DC comics, which I also briefly covered before.)
Go back a decade (and a bit) further still, and you’d find DC reprints in Super Adventure Comic from Atlas Publishing… and that one ran from 1950 to 1959 for 120 issues, which is not bad at all given that most British comics of the era were weekly. So there was indeed, once upon a time, a long-lasting DC reprint anthology comic published in the UK! Hooray! Except that Atlas Publishing was an Australian company and Super Adventure Comic was imported into the UK, so it doesn’t really count.
I’m actually still a tiny bit angry that DC Action! didn’t make a bigger splash, and I put the blame on the low frequency and high price far more than anything else. Had it been the other way around, with a high frequency and low price — say published monthly for £1.00 per issue — I think it could have soared. Track down some back-issues and see for yourself: this really was high-quality stuff.
Rusty Staples 