Action was a British weekly boys' comic published by IPC Magazines from 14 February 1976 to 5 November 1977, when it merged with war comic Battle after 86 issues. The comic was created by Pat Mills and Geoff Kemp.

While initially a sales success, the comic quickly received media criticism for its violent content, causing a moral panic that ultimately saw it withdrawn from sale by IPC in October 1976, amid rumours it was to be banned. Action returned two months later in a much-sanitised form, quickly losing readers and being cancelled the following year. Despite its short lifespan, Action was highly influential on the British comics scene, and was a direct forerunner of the long-running 2000 AD.

After a successful stint working on various IPC girls' comics, Pat Mills had interviewed for the vacant position of managing editor at the company. Mills felt the company's output had grown stale and outdated and told the board so, and wasn't offered the job due to his forthright criticism. However, his fresh ideas had been noted by editorial director John Sanders, who likewise felt the company's comics needed an overhaul but found it politically difficult to do so due to the long-serving, well-connected nature of much of the company's staff. He was impressed enough to remember Mills when charged with creating an answer to DC Thomson's Warlord comic, assigning Mills and his fellow freelancer John Wagner to create Battle Picture Weekly in 1974. Despite internal friction from the bypassed staff the comic was a major triumph, and Sanders quickly moved to use them elsewhere in IPC's boys adventure division.

Wagner was given editorship of Valiant, which had been the company's leading title of the sixties but was now increasingly outdated, while Mills was tasked with creating a new weekly. Having learnt about Mills' perfectionism in the launch of Battle – which required the guidance of veteran Dave Hunt to make its launch date – Mills was given a choice of staff editors to work with, picking the experienced Geoff Kemp. Kemp had a long history with the company, including a sizeable stint as assistant editor of Lion (which he had helped update in the mid-1960s, being the driving force behind the introduction of the likes of anti-hero The Spider) but was identified by Sanders and Mills as one of the staff most open to new ideas. The pair were given three months to put the comic together from scratch; while Mills felt this was a "ridiculously short time", the more seasoned Kemp would later note it was the longest run-in he had ever known. The pair quickly settled on a formula of taking extant story ideas, approaching them from a different angle and injecting a large amount of contemporary realism. Mills envisioned making a title that appealed to children that didn't read comics rather than simply trying to draw an audience from other titles, and as such aimed to make the title streetwise and more in touch.

Following this template, the pair looked at the blockbuster film Jaws and switched the perspective by following the shark, while making many of the human characters unsympathetic, to create "Hook Jaw". "Hellman of Hammer Force" took the old staple of World War II but followed an Axis protagonist in the form of fiercely principled tank commander Major Kurt Hellman. According to Mills, Sanders was initially reluctant about running the story, but was worn down by repeated requests. "Dredger" applied the hard-edged ethos of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry to the spy genre. "Blackjack" was a boxing story, but unlike those featured previously in the likes of Tiger and Valiant not only took a closer look at corruption in the sport but also featured a black protagonist, infused with the brashness of Muhammad Ali; Mills would later recall some of IPC's staff felt Barron being black would make the strip unpopular, and urging him to change the character to a white man with a black sidekick. A similarly unsentimental view of athletics and youth was evident in "Sport's Not For Losers!", about a working class lout who smoked but had an unexpected talent for long-distance running. For "The Running Man", Mafiosi and a face-swap were added to the format of The Fugitive. The obligatory football strip, "Play Till You Drop!", featured a player controlled by a blackmailing journalist, while "The Coffin Sub" featured a captain wracked with survivor's guilt wondering if he was leading his new crew to their deaths. Rejected were an ecologically tinged fishing story (dropped when a dummy episode proved too bleak) and a story about a photographer with a knack of getting in the thick of unpleasant situations, as well as World War I aviation strip "The Suicide Club" by Kelvin Gosnell (which was eventually used as a one-off in the 1976 Action Special).

They also looked at the editorial content, feeling that this also dated their competitors by generally being too paternal and condescending. Steve MacManus, who was writing "The Running Man" and "Sport's Not For Losers!", found himself corralled into the role of 'ActionMan', whereby readers would set the unfortunate writer bizarre stunts; MacManus would be photographed doing the winning entry and the reader who submitted it would be awarded with £10. MacManus also handled running the letters column, taking on the persona of a put-upon dogsbody forever trying to avoid tyrannical editor Peg-Leg and have a cup of tea in peace. Readers were encouraged to submit bizarre and stupid questions to resident 'Knowall' Milton Finesilver and, most anarchically, to nominate a public figure as 'Twit of the Week'. Each 'Twit' would have their portrait printed together with a pithy dismissal of whatever they had done to invoke the readership's ire. Bamber Gascoigne, Nicholas Parsons, Russell Harty, The Bay City Rollers, Malcolm Allison and Tony Blackburn were among those honoured. The idea was to let the readers know they considered them as equals – in the words of MacManus, to let readers know "We know what you're thinking". As with Battle, the plan was for Mills and Kemp to bed in the new title and then hand it over to an experienced editor for week-to-week running.

Mills purposefully modelled the page layouts on infamous British tabloid newspaper The Sun, later explaining: -

My thinking was to play them at their own game and use that approach to do Action... figure out how the popular culture media indoctrinates readers with their establishment shite and rival it with equally popular counter-culture. So don't do a version of Oz or International Times, as much as I admire them, as that will have limited appeal to kids, but do a subversive equivalent of mainstream media culture.