*Boys’ Adventure & War Comics: From 1976, the debut issue of Action, the well-beloved weekly which was the home of cuddly man-eating shark Hookjaw and several other strips of remarkable controversy and violence! Pre-dating its longer-lived stablemate 2000 AD, and serving to ‘incubate’ much of 2000 AD’s talent, Action paved the way for a darker, bloodier and more cynical trend in boys’ adventure weeklies, with even the traditional genres of sport and war strips getting a nihilistic veneer – to the point where it was eventually banned from the newsstands, to re-emerge months later as a soft-serve shadow of its former self. This is the issue which kicked it all off, and it’s a beautiful copy. Unless they’re printed on slick paper, British comics seldom achieve higher than a Fine grade – the acids in the cheap pulp degrade the pages, causing yellowing and brittleness – but this has obviously been kept very carefully; it’s tight, bright & white, a lovely FN/VF copy of a controversial premier issue, on sale at £50. SORRY, THIS HAS NOW SOLD