In his 1989 book Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics, Martin Barker devoted a section to the story of Action. The work in this book predates Action - The Story of a Violent Comic by some time, and is less accurate with regard to content. In its favour, it includes some strips that were not published elsewhere, including the uncut Hell's Highway strip from the lost issue. The book is more of an academic study of comics and their perception than the later work, and explores themes that would later emerge in Barker's A Haunt of Fears, a book about the media and public reaction to the British horror comics of the 1950s that were very quickly banned.

A large portion of the text is given over to a study of the readers of Action. At the time of the ban, Action was shifting something like 180,000 copies a week and this figure was on the increase. What Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics tries to achieve is a study of those readers, their age and background, their attitudes and commitment towards the comic, their interpretation of the stories and characters, and how Action compared to the other boys' comics of the time. It's an exhaustive study, which unfortunately had only 135 completed responses within the timescale that was set. Even so, a profile of the committed and not so committed readers could be drawn, and Action's difference to its main rivals was plain to see. The readers survey took place in 1986-87. The statistics were sent to me recently, and they make for a good read if you're up for a few facts and figures. Not to everyone's tastes I'm sure, but I trawled through them and I've put a few bits of information up here to look at, including the basic survey results.