If you were to travel back to Friday June 23rd 1972, and if you had nothing more important on your mind, it might prove a challenge to uncover a copy of TV Action + Countdown #71 in the UK’s more orthodox and methodical high-street newsagents. Six of the comic’s days on the shelves were already gone, and last week’s comics were very much last week’s comics. But away from the likes of W. H. Smith and John Menzies stood a world of shops where comics were habitually left on sale, and often long past their sell-by dates. There, TV+C#71 might well be uncovered by those looking for a hit of the fantastical and up to searching for it.
With the fantastical in such short supply in the culture compared to today, TV Action & Countdown possessed some appreciable virtues. Firstly, it featured tales of some of television’s most significant and enjoyable sci-fi shows, with, in this issue, three pages dedicated to both Doctor Who and Gerry & Sylvia Anderson’s U.F.O.. Secondly, the art on these headlining strips was characteristically superb. Gerry Havelock’s work on the Third Doctor stories is delightful. His skills extended far beyond his utterly convincing likeness of Jon Pertwee’s Time Lord. His colour work, for example, is a joy, with unorthodox and eye-catching choices such as the bold blocks of backroom pink, red and yellow you can see in the cover scan above. Regrettably, only the first of the Doctor’s three pages were in colour, although Havelock’s storytelling remains compelling despite an exceedingly crowded and speedy script. It’s a story that, while perfectly keeping with the spirit of the Doctor’s 1972’s TV adventures, begs to be given room to breath. To be fair, that was only very rarely the way with British strips aimed at a younger audience.
Similarly, John Burns’ pages for the UFO strip inside TV+C#71 show the versatile and accomplished artist opting to accentuate the TV show’s partial turn from glorious technological fetishism towards psychedelic-tinged unease. As a result, the story feels both of-its-moment and, in the visuals at least, appropriately unsettling.
Sadly, the script itself is, even within the broad parameters of U.F.O.’s fictional universe, alienating absurd. Not even Burns can save a tale that turns on Commander Straker being willingly shrunk to half-an-inch tall for no apparently good reason at all.
On the one hand, the chance to see fresh and visually enticing takes on the likes of Doctor Who and U.F.O. made TV Action + Countdown a perpetually enticing comic. But the fact that its stories were mostly, for all their artistic virtues, underwhelming left the comic feeling unsatisfying. For those seeking a hit of undiluted sci-fi action, the comic’s other strips such as Hawaii Five-O and The Persuaders further diluted the comic’s appeal. Even the presence of reprints of old 1960s TV Century 21 tales, such as Thunderbirds with beautiful Frank Bellamy art, couldn’t make the comic cohere into a title that felt like it delivered more than it promised.
But with the age’s relative paucity of the fantastical , TV Action + Countdown was always to be a temptation.
The Almanac Of The Fantastical 