There were fifty issues of Action produced between November 1976 and November 1977, the first of which was dated December 4th 1976. In addition to the hasty round-ups of Death Game 1999, Hook Jaw, Hell's Highway, Look Out For Lefty! and Hellman on the Russian Front, this issue would have contained muted endings to Kids Rule O.K. and Probationer. Instead, they were quietly dropped, and readers were 'treated' to Roaring Wheels and Double Dynamite, to make the issue more of a relaunch than a footnote to the first series of Action. The issue dated 11th December featured the re-booted versions of Spinball and Hook Jaw, which were judged more suitable for a juvenile audience. Lefty clattered into a new story of sorts, as the Rotherfield Rippers storyline petered-out somewhat indifferently and he bought a goat. By January 1st 1977, existing material for Hell's Highway and Hellman had been exhausted. There is a suggestion that Hell's Highway was almost at an end, which is why the artist changed for the new material, but more of that later. Hellman's retreat from Russia, on foot, with a legion of convicts, suddenly snapped to the sunshine of Italy, for reasons never explained.

The new era for Action was widely unloved, and sales plummeted, leading to its absorption by Battle within a year. This section aims to show the last gasps of the old whilst dealing with the inadequacy of the new. One irritating feature of the new Action was to treat the readers like idiots. Constantly putting 'Continued overleaf' at the bottom of pages assumes the reader is too stupid to realise that they need to turn the page to carry on reading, and that the story doesn't end just because the page has...