Phoo Action: Silver Jubilee Tasty Taster by Mat Wakeham

SILVER JUBILEE

By Jamie Hewlett & Mat Wakeham

GET THE FREEBIES

Albert Squares Acid Blotters

Pencil, Ink, magic markers, digital image and lysergic acid 1997/2022

Twenty-five years ago, The Prodigy’s dearly departed Twisted Firestarter leered out from newsstands on the front cover of

The Face No.95, July 1996. Undeniably iconic, Keith Flint was the human personification of punk, rave and pop.

But the cover was notable for a few other things; the scoop on the 50 best clubs in Britain was promised, and top right top billing, Get the Freebies. An exclusive new comic strip by the creator of Tank Girl

Get the Freebies is a fitting counterpart to its cover star in many ways. In them both, two classic staples of the early 90s had been reborn with an arresting, flame-haired look that flew in the face of banality and conservatism. They mirrored a sea change happening in culture at large, as the kids who grew up on warehouse parties noticed that they didn’t make Es quite like they used to, and moved onto the harder stuff, while the rave itself moved from the breezy fields to dark interiors. The coke-snorting, club-dwelling Whitey Action’s adventures continued Tank Girl’s uncompromising, no bullshit attitude while prefiguring Gorillaz’s Celebrity Takedown of pop culture with the strip's blistering onslaught on 90s celebrities. A stealth attack on the very culture that The Face celebrated. Launched by publisher Nick Logan in May 1980, The Face was a perfect encapsulation of the next two decades. The forward-thinking monthly magazine blazed a trail of visual innovation and sheer energy, combining ground-breaking photography and design with smart writing and a dry sense of humour. Although it’s hard to envisage now, in 1980 there was simply no mainstream media outside of the music press that reflected what was going on in youth culture.

Having a strip run in these pages set Jamie further apart from the rest of the comics industry and acknowledged his wider cultural impact. Make no mistake, this was a genuine stamp of cool approval, a real feather in his cap at the time. Not that it phased him. Day one, page one, he set to mercilessly ridiculing the outdated, tired, unrepresentative and non-inclusive hypocrisy of the celebrity-obsessed, mainstream normative culture, without a single concern for those who may have found themselves in his crosshairs. Every strip is carpet-bombed throughout by name-checks, cameos and blended pop culture passions culled from prime-time TV, cinema, the music industry and national radio. However, recognition of these figures and institutions is in no way required to appreciate the cynical, street-smart dialogue and incandescently energetic art.

The stories loosely follow a London supercop duo comprised of Whitey Action, whip-smart but disaffected,

self-medicating and potty-mouthed, and Terry Phoo, a gay, occasionally hapless kung fu superhero. Their ridiculous adventures usually, but not always, find them combatting their equally ridiculous nemeses, the mutant Freebies gang. The twelve episodes, which ran from July ‘96 to July ‘97, are packed with insane characters, nudity, slander and defamation, drugs and violence. These take place by way of an illegal child fight club, an incredible journey to the centre of a Radio One DJ, LSD more potent than any since Timothy Leary’s Bar Mitzvah, a trip to heaven in Jesus’ speedboat, and a plot to beat irritating West End dullard Darren Day raw.

As in Tank Girl before, Hewlett remained disinterested in traditional superheroics, and amid all the crime-busting insanity, there are warm little insights into the domestic life of Terry and Whitey in their shared, Soho apartment. This includes drug-addled Saturday morning TV from The Mighty Snorting Powder Rangers, or Whitey stirring her coffee with Terry’s penis as he meditates full frontal in their kitchen. Alongside these one-to-one dynamics, the reader is afforded glimpses of their relationships with their other significant others; Giles, Terry’s loving boyfriend who Whitey cannot stand, and Elanor, Whitey’s plutonium-poisoned, party-hard bestie.

The experimental storytelling owes a debt to Xaime Hernandez’s Love and Rockets series, where the lives of tremendously believable female heroes play out on conventional, everyday backdrops. To this end, we see Jamie demonstrating his chops with more conventional, rigid page layouts here, a stark contrast from the giddy lack of restraint employed in Tank Girl. This change in tack was inspired in part by Mad Magazine’s master storyteller, Mort Drucker. Meanwhile, Jimmy Freebie, the crowned, basketball-headed kingpin of crime, is seemingly inspired by another of Jamie’s all-time muses, Charles ‘Chuck’ Jones, the American animator and director of over two hundred Looney Tunes shorts for Warner Bros. Jimmy himself is Daffy Duck mashed up with Yosemite Sam, The Tasmanian Devil and Benito Mussolini. For the rest of The Freebies, Marlon’s petite, shivering frame contains smatterings of psychotic Chihuahua Ren Höek, spliced with effete actor Charles Hawtree of Carry On! fame. Burk, meanwhile, is the missing fifth Hanna-Barbera Banana Split.

The work of an earlier generation of British comics artists and writers also provides a nexus of influence,

such as Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy’s psychedelic, postmodern celebrity superhero strip Paradax, which mixed the epic and the everyday to stunning effect. And, as was so often the case in Jamie’s first decade, we feel the powerful influence of Mike McMahon, one of the chief progenitors of Judge Dredd, specifically the acute sense of design and chiaroscuro colour he displayed on his 1991 masterpiece The Last American. That Whitey Action could be the rave generation Mini the Minx is a theory I also personally adhere to. Mix all of the above with a dash of Libatore's Ranxerox world of ultra-violence, narcotics, dubious erotica, and provocations and you have the incendiary Get the Freebies formula.

The first issue, heralded as ‘feature length’ by The Face, introduces Whitey, Terry, and The Freebies by way of a standalone meta-story, which has Jamie himself pitching the strip as a twisted TV show to the unimpressed producers of High as a Kite, Britain’s leading multimedia youth show, a prescient foreshadowing of real-life troubles to come. This fourth wall-breaking peek behind the magician’s curtain wasn’t Jamie’s first crack at the opening episode, however. You can see some of the abandoned first passes on the upcoming pages of this book. It’s remarkable to see Jamie create beautiful, finished sequential art, then redraw the same scenes with different angles, props, and an entirely new Jimmy Freebie, only for none of the pages to be ultimately published until now. It’s a level of perfectionism that may be surprising to some, seemingly in contrast to the joy and effortless brilliance that permeates his art.

These early pencils have much in common with Jamie’s later Tank Girl work, but the strip quickly gains its own, distinct style and rhythm. The majority of Get the Freebies was hand-coloured in his late 90s method, employing magic markers applied to a photocopy of the original artwork on artboard, a technique he’d first tried out with Tank Girl in her outing in US style magazine Details in ‘95. Terry’s hollow, white eyes will be seen once more when 2D rolls into town in the Gorillaz Geep, itself seemingly a resprayed Freebies Mobile, based on a Manx-Meyer Beach Buggy, which Jamie had a Corgi Whizzwheels toy of on his desk which he used for drawing reference. And now that Noodle is all grown up, 20 years after arriving in a crate from Hong Kong, she’s a redhead mop-top doppelgänger for her older sister, Whitey.

Jamie’s visual flair and inventiveness, by this point, honed over a decade of internationally-acclaimed comics, are captured like lightning in a bottle on the pages of Get the Freebies. It’s a masterclass in kinetic, muscular storytelling, through its bright, exhilarating, and kaleidoscopic levels of detail, packed with dark humour, sexual innuendo, and counter-culture references. Here you get to see Jamie in full flight, flexing his late 90s abilities as a world-class comics artist, his final long-form work to date in his first chosen medium. These strips have never been collected and reprinted in their original English language. Before now there was only a Spanish imprint, ¡A Por Los Freebies!, which was published in 2007, and is still available from Ediciones La Cúpula. Nearly all of the other preparatory work and deleted ancillary art are being published for the first time.

Superfast Beach

Boxed Digital photograph 2022 above

Digital photograph 2022

Matchbox

Buggy No.30

Corgi Toys No. 381, GP Beach Buggy ‘Whizzwheels’ Boxed

Terry Phoo & The Freebies

Pencil, ink, magic marker and acrylic paint on artboard, AI-upscaled 1996/2022

Terry Phoo

Pencil and ink on artboard

Terry Phoo, Whitey Action & The Freebies

Pencil, ink and Letratone on artboard

Jimmy Freebie / Shits Pencil, ink, magic marker and photocopy on artboard 1996

Terry Phoo, Whitey Action & The Freebies

Pencil, ink and Tipp-Ex on artboard

The Freebies (Every Home Should Have One) Pencil and ink on artboard 1996

COMICS

Get the Freebies

Digital photograph of The Face Magazine reproductions from Wakeham’s collection 1996/2022 following

Get the Freebies

Relettered reproduction of the original comics 1996–1997/2022

GET THE FREEBIES

2 PHOO ACTION

Whitey Action & Terry Phoo

Pencil, eraser and masking tape on graph paper

Whitey Action

Pencil and eraser on graph paper 1997

Whitey Action

Photocopy and magic marker on artboard

Phoo Action Pen and ink on artboard, digitally restored and coloured 1997/2022

Fransfusion, The Sharkey, The Stink Bomber & The Enfeebler Pen and ink on artboard, digitally restored and coloured 1997/2022

featured

Jamie Hewlett

Illustration

Services Flyer Artwork

Pencil, ink, Letratone and photocopies on artboard 1997

Phillip Bond's Phoo Action: Prose Roughs Digital drawings 2022

Inked Comics Panel

Pencil and ink on artboard, digitally enhanced 1997/2022 following

Phoo Action, Ch.1: Lungs of Buddha, Cancelled Comic Strip

Colour Xerox of pen, ink, magic marker and photocopy on artboard, digitally enhanced 1997/2022

Phoo Action: Illustrated Prose Digital art and prose story 2022

Based on a Story by Written by Story Editors Illustrated by Hewlett & Wakeham Wakeham Harvey & Root Bond

ENTER THE FLYING SCOTSMAN

I awake the morning after the night before. Except it’s the afternoon. I feel like I’m missing something. It feels bad. I feel bad.

It’s felt that way since The Freebies: Jimmy, Marlon and Burk, buggered off to the great beyond like good little fucksticks who’d finally learnt their lessons. It’s felt that way since we met Jesus jumpsuit-wearing Christ himself. And God. Who was, it turned out, a bit of a grumpy bastard. Not much of a surprise, what with war, famine, death, taxes, and the corporate shitheels who don’t pay a penny of them.

Poor Terry. Meeting Jesus really put the bejesus up him, his Buddhist underpinnings getting a proper theological seeing-to. Now he thinks hell exists and he’s definitely going there, you know, what with him being a fabulous, rampant homosexualist and all. I wouldn’t worry too much. I mean, I don’t believe in God and I fucking met him last week.

Of course, it didn’t help getting shitfaced last night at Curly Chang’s restaurant with Remus, my boyfriend. He’s also my drug dealer. I know that sounds bad on paper. Look, he’s not my boyfriend because he’s a drug dealer. He’s my boyfriend because I love him. And I’m a drug addict.

Oh yeah, and at some point we ram-raided Stringfellow’s. Probably an accident, but who knows? All I remember is tires squealing, strippers and greasy old men screaming, and me shovelling the whole buffet table into our boot.

After Stringy’s we painted the streets of Covent Garden red. Literally, I mean, because the proprietor’s mullet got caught

in my Porsche flip-top headlights as we backed out, and he lost seven pints of Viagra-addled claret before we realised what had happened. All this was only adding to an uneasy feeling that's been sitting like a cancerous growth in my guts since I won the National Lottery. Did I mention that I won the Lottery? I did. Perhaps that’s why I cultivated a crack habit bigger than Ken Barlow’s while Terry went to the Himalayas to mop up his spiritual heebie-jeebies and get his third eye blown out.

Then it hit me. Terry! He was due back and I was supposed to have picked him up from Heathrow. Fuck! I would be panicking if I wasn’t busy being sick in his Gucci slippers. Then something else hit me. Terry’s voice! Right here, in person. In the flat. In hushed and reverent tones. In Cantonese… I think. And just like that, I felt better.

I mean, not like “better” better; I’d been on far too many class As for that. Maybe I would never truly feel like myself again, but that sense of something being missing from my life suddenly abated with my partner in crime-fighting and derring-do finally coming back home.

Right, time to get up and go to the bathroom. And actually in the bathroom this time, not in Peter Stringfellow’s gaping head wound.

I shuffle into the loo, lighting my first Indigenous Spirit ciggie of the day. These are the world’s 6th most expensive cigarettes, but they’re organic and have fewer chemicals. Each one contains the genuine ghost of a cowboy who wandered onto sacred land. This means I’m

simultaneously doing my bit for the First Nations while inexplicably spending the next half hour walking with bow legs and saying “pardner” a lot. Win-win. And then I notice the other person on the toilet.

Slap-bang on top of the toilet, grasping the poop-hoop with their strong, wide toes. It is perhaps the oldest-looking Chinese man I have ever seen. He looks at me and simultaneously through me, smiling the sincerest of smiles through the wrinkles on his sun-warmed face. Clearly, this piss is a write-off, so I shuffle off to Terry’s en suite and take a wee in his sink. I practise what I am going to say next for a full minute.

“Terry!? What the fuckaroni and cheese!?” I barrel in, all Sturm und Drang, trying to mask how secretly delighted I am. Terry's having none of it. My brassy braggadocio bounces straight off of his chirpy demeanour.

“Sorry Whitey, did we wake you?” he says. God. Look at him. Uff! He’s had that foppy fringe cut off. Under his black martial arts garms, his body looks like it has become even more toned, and quite frankly my lady bits are a bit lost for words. And bloody hell, is he calm. We stand looking at one another. Him beaming, me remembering just how much this silly bastard lights the place up.

Then, the old guy from the loo silently appears beside me, and Terry blusters around the kitchen, moving a precarious column of bamboo steamers to the dining table, announcing “快啲食啦, 佢食到成隻肚餓

嘅母豬一樣,” whatever that means.

Then to me, he says, “Breakfast. There are steamed buns, doughnut sticks, and my full english jianbing. Tuck in!”

That kind of bollocks doesn’t warrant a response. Breakfast solids and I do not mix, and Terry should know it. I fill the stove-top espresso with thermonuclear Nicaraguan grind, put it on the hob, spark another Spirit and wait. Wait as the gas hisses away. Wait as the old man wolfs down breakfast. Wait for Terry to do the honours and tell me who the fuck this is!

The two of them finish their copious bowls of whatever while I polish off three shots of caffeine Krakatoa. I don’t take my eyes off this wrinkly enigma, not that he is bothered by my patented Action Hard Stare™. In fact, once he’s finished his expedition up carbohydrate mountain he returns The Stare™ twice as intently but without an ounce of the arseyness, and with a kindness I wasn’t expecting. Making me wonder why I’d been such a mopey twat to him in the first place. “You win this round,” I think, hoping he can’t read minds too. Then Terry solves the mystery, and I put my Sherlock Holmes hat back in my pants. “Whitey, this is Sifu Shi Yan Chien, a senior Buddhist monk who over the past 25 years has guided my life both spiritually and in the ways of combat.” That sparks a flicker of recognition in my chaz-encrusted brainbox. Terry used to bang on about this guy all the time. Plus, his meditation shrine has a bunch of fuzzy, orangehued eighties photos of a younger version of him, too, now I come to think of it.

The monk glances at my cigarette-yellowed fingers and grasps my hand warmly. “You can call me Chien. I’m so happy to finally meet you. Terry has told me so much.” Terry’s cheeks go as pink as uncooked pork. “I’ve heard all about you, your rebellious spirit, your Utility Pants… if you would indulge me, I would be honoured to see how they work.” If I wasn’t so world-and-booze-weary I might have taken umbrage with some old sod asking about my pants seconds after he’d met me. But here, I feel

like my relentless bitchy bravado won’t cut it. I had to let it slide. Plus, y’know, hearing about Terry singing my praises didn’t hurt. I need to meet him on his own level, to be as sincere, kind and unaffected as he had been with me.

“Well sir, I reckon that would be mighty fine, dagnabbit,” I say. Shit. Those cigarettes were starting to kick in again. Anyway, it’s late, and Terry and I had a date. There’s no rest for superhero-superstar-supercop duos you know? In three hours, we are supposed to be guests of honour at the opening show of the U.K.-hosted World Cup, as some sort of bread-andcircuses appeasement after The Freebies’ nuclear device totalled most of North London, sending a whacking great cloud of fallout halfway up the bloody M1.

I toddle off to the underground garage as I figure I had better charge the Phoomobile’s battery for the first time in far too fuckin’ long. Then my phone buzzes out of my pants.

Remus. I just let it ring.

I start cramming shit off the seats into the glove box. This is going to be a new and improved era of Whitey Action. Responsible. Organized. Finding a stale joint under the seat next to the broken GameBoy. “Be rude not to,” I thought. And this is how Terry found me, passed out in the Phoomobile with the doors wide-open, the stereo blasting the 1978 soundtrack of Theodoros Bafaloukos’ film Rockers! and a roach burn in the headrest by my drooling face.

That’s when things turn frosty. Terry wants me to take him through the opening show rehearsals in exacting detail. Timings. Choreography. The list of the other celebritards, which is a portmanteau of “celebrities” and “dullards,” and football fuckwits that we’d be sharing centre stage with.

I have dick-all. If anyone told me, I hadn’t paid attention. If there was a letter about it, I’d thrown it in the bin. I style it out, skinning up a fatty. Back in the flat, any composure Terry brought back from his spiritual sojourn evaporates as he ping-pongs around in panic, emptying the overflowing bins and ashtrays, deforesting the crockery and dis-mantling my takeout container fortress, all while making calls to the World Cup organisational hotline to offer up humble pie and assurances.

He then crossly hands me a bin bag chock-a-block with sex toys, lubes, and implements of pleasure that have accumulated throughout his bachelor’s pad while I have been responsibly housesitting for free.

See, when Terry first left and the money from the lotto hit, I purchased a gigantic 24/7 nihilistically nasty party house. Have you seen Caligula? Well, it was nothing like that, except for the constant suckin’ and fuckin’ in togas. Big, blue Bill was my live-in bouncer-cum-sex slave for a bit, but it didn’t stick. Despite Bill being made of indestructible rock, he was always a big softie and only wanted the best for me, and this drug-fueled fuckfest wasn’t it. So we called it quits and I took up residence back in Casa Del Tel on the 13th floor of William Blake House, Soho, waiting for T-Bone to come home, and for that sordid pile to be knocked down and rebuilt. Only this time with escape hatches, panic rooms and missile silos. I’m still trying to get the permit for a shark-filled moat. Let’s see how those leaflet-dropping cunts like them apples? Though the thick ones do make good roach paper.

But back to Terry. You’ve gotta love that he cannot bear the thought of leaving his flat untidy even if he’s about to go on global television without a Scooby Doo of what he’s supposed to be doing. I know we have nothing to worry about. We’ll ace it. We always do. Rehearsals are for ballet dancers and Barry fucking Manilow. That’s not me and it’s not him.

So, before we know it, we’re racing through the London streets, the Phoomobile parting the sea of double-deckers, hackney cabs and lycra-clad bicycle couriers like a motorised metal Moses. We’re back. Terry always drives like a bastard, and I love it. So does Chien. His infectious laugh from the back seat has given me stoned contact giggles; the more he laughs, the more I laugh, and the more I laugh, the more he laughs, and the faster Terry drives.

A cacophonous chorus of car horns and the smell of beer, piss and desperation let us know the stadium is close. Sozzled students, socialites and scumbags hanging out of everything you can think of that has a window, draped in their respective national flags. London has World Cup fever and it’s terminal, may cause vomiting and the only known treatment is going along with it like a braindead fucking zombie. I slide down in my seat, my bare legs sticking intermittently to the Naugahyde, no longer laughing, my buzz killed, and with an impending sense of doom.

Terry is in his element. We can see the entrance looming but the crowd’s too thick to get through and too thick to notice him. He knows these pissheads aren’t going to budge no matter how hard he honks, but I can see a plan beginning to formulate in the corners of his lips. He swerves a hard left, leaning almost completely out of the door like he’s John fucking Woo on bath salts, one foot on the steering wheel, and bugger me if he doesn’t flip it up on two wheels, ramp off the back of a pub league rugby player who just crouched down to tie his Nikes, and the car sails upside down over the crowd with me and Chien smooshed up against the handstitched vinyl roof. I still think seatbelts are for goody two shoes, though, which is probably why Terry’s fine. And then, with predictable grace, we land the right way up like a cat. Meow.

What a plonker. Brilliant. But a plonker. And this is how we enter the VIP entrance for the glimmering World Cup stadium with onlookers braying and grunting with joy as if he hadn’t almost decapitated them seconds earlier and God, I wish that he had. And just as I’m about to admit that, yeah, maybe that was pretty fucking cool, I see the TV News Helicopters swarming overhead. Terry’s little Michael Bay moment was beamed to the world like it was planned. As I said. The only preparation Terry needs is H.

Over in Bayswater, in the chaos-strewn Ancient China restaurant kitchens, something far more dangerous than a flying Phoomobile is going down. Whitey Action had dismissed the corny tale Curly span about his family treasure and the Buddha freeing the world from the enslavement and debaucheries of an ancient Chinese demon, who just happened to share his last name. It all seemed far-fetched, though she was intrigued by those debaucheries.

It turns out, though, that every last, crazy, convoluted, olde-worlde word of it is true. And when some Bayswater arse-cloths broke into Curly’s right after Whitey and Remus left, they got a shitload more than they had bargained for.

Chef Bernie’s meat cleaver is still lodged in the little one’s cranium, his blood and brains congealed on its heavy, sharpened blade, his animating spirit long since parted.

The big one got it worse, if that’s possible, and is now a gelatinous human smoothie on the kitchen floor. If Ancient China wanted to keep their Greater London food standards licence, they would need to put in some elbow grease. Not that they could. Curly was no more. Taking residence in his mortal remains is The Dread Demon Li Long Chang, his dank hair in a topknot, his sharp, sinister face painted entirely white except for the middle, which was marked by a blood-red circle, framing a mouth full of fangs. He, at least, is feeling better, finally free from the tiny bottle that the pious, meddling, Buddha had tricked him into countless aeons hence, bringing an end to his Banquet of Evil that had held China in its thrall. But that was the past and this is the present. No, the future and the Buddha are nowhere in sight.

Creeping vapours begin to enshroud the room, twisting and turning, thick and libidinous, sighing like they are a living thing. They ensnare the hands and feet of the only survivor from the night prior: Chef Bernie. The ethereal bonds are a bit itchy, and definitely not good for his eczema.

Li Long now turns his attention toward Bernie. The Demon looks at the wet human remains on the floor, then the mop and bucket, and finally at the chef himself. His message is received and understood. No hope in hell, thinks Bernie. Not after he witnessed Curly’s soul sucked dry by this 560BC bodysnatcher.

Li Long knows only too well that there is no hope in hell. No hope, no nice bottles of wine on a summer’s evening, no thoughtful pleasantries, no popping round your mate’s gaff for a cuppa and a chin-wag. Hell is shit, and Bernie will soon be in it up to his eyeballs.

Li Long Chang rests his clammy hands on Bernie’s brow and begins to extract the memory of man’s atrocities that is scorched into our very DNA like a festering, fungal scar, handed down through ancestral lines. Genocides, religious persecution, forced labour, war crimes, motorway service station food, Saturday night TV schedules, anthropogenically exacerbated diseases and disasters, middle-aged men wearing socks and sandals, human sacrifice, quivering, yappy dogs, and the film career of Matt LeBlanc. The Demon is intoxicated by this sweet and potent elixir of suffering that he swears to syphon from every being in the city so that he, the Castrophonous One, can feast and grow strong upon it, just as he has with this lowlife cook.

Bernie is now entirely under his control. The inhabitants of this filthy new metropolis would soon follow. The world would come next, and whether they willingly joined him or not made no difference. If they retaliate, each salvo, round and bombardment would only increase his strength through the bountiful harvest of torment. First though, he needed to find his generals, such latter-day awful tossers that only an ancient evil spirit, bent on total annihilation would want. Luckily, in London, there’s any number, if you only know where to look.

He sends Bernie to retrieve the restaurant’s delivery moped and some crash helmets, and the two of them set out into the night. The broken shell of Bernie wrings the throttle wide open, sending the nifty little 150cc scooter rocketing through London, Li Long perched on the deliveries box akin to some towering gargoyle. With the city host to the World Cup, the streets are awash with tribal chants, menace, excitement and danger, feeding Li Long deliciously. Spectral tendrils of hatred flow from him, bringing a frothing demonic derangement to all who come into contact with it. Cabbies, school kids, dog walkers and Old Street knobheads. No one’s immune, but its influence can’t take hold for long. Li Long must build a more sustained power base to bring his second dynasty to life.

There’s a fouler energy afoot than football and the Piccadilly Line at rush hour crush. Li Long feels it and directs Bernie straight towards the source. The scooter pulls up to the edge of the apocalyptic crater that was

once King’s Cross. Deep inside this radioactive hole, one building is left standing in the epicentre. The Flying Scotsman. A venue better known for its bar brawls than its beer quality, and now as one of the last remaining strip pubs in the post-nuclear city. Where the strippers will bounce anyone out of the doors faster than security can, whether for putting a hand on them or God forbid, a beer on their stage. Only now, new customers frequent its bar stools; a group of crazed mutant criminals plotting their first act of lawless stupidity, in order to fill the space vacated by The Freebies.

Like a cock to a cantaloupe, a busload of footie fans pulls up outside. The barmy Tartan Army, Scotland’s own brave and true, who in all innocence think that a pub called The Flying Scotsman will be a good place for them to watch the opening match. The pub being in a nuclear crater does nothing to deter them, and the mutants were nothing you wouldn’t see in Glasgow town centre after 11:30 pm.

The Tartan Army are celebrated for their good nature and sportsmanship, but it’s not going to win these dick-showing crazies any pals today. First, they crank the volume on the pub TV to catch the opening ceremony, the figures on the screen barely visible through radioactive snow. “Is that no’ Liam fuckin’ Gallagher giving Bez a backie?” Next, they’re standing atop the tables and chairs, chanting along with the Madchester supergroup World Cup anthem Mad for Footie that’s being broadcast from the opening ceremony, other patrons be damned.

The ghoulish mutants find their fiendish scheming disturbed. Sick Bag Cyril, the pub's former landlord and their leader, resplendent in a homemade gimp mask full of puke, doesn’t hesitate to unleash their attack dog. From under a tarpaulin comes the combined flesh, bone, and lingerie of all the pub’s former strippers, sub-atomically fused into one heavily hostile homunculus by The Freebies’ nuclear strike.

the music pumping from the TV, and like she still expects tips from the men she’s making mincemeat of. Each burly Ben Nevis tumbles in her path, limbs flying like tossed cabers.

Fran is just for kick-off because another mutant gangster is up on his wheels. The Stink Bomber; a skinny, gas-masked blur, darting around the charred pub confines at such speeds that he mounts the sides like a wall of death. From here, he fires putrid gas bombs into the squall at high velocity. Exploding on impact, their glass shards lacerate their targets, while the vomit-inducing gas overwhelms their senses. Beaten, bloodied, and breathless, the worst is yet to come.

An exposed brain and an unfeasibly petite body are all that’s left of washed-up chart-botherer Brian Harvey of East17. After he lost his own skull in the aftermath of a horrible baked potato-related accident, he inadvertently unleashed a powerful hypnotic force and his secret criminal persona, The Enfeebler. The patrons are bathed in a dulcet chorus, frozen into place by his spellbinding earworm. Tears roll uncontrollably down their faces as the most sorrowful, man-child vocals they’ve ever heard envelop them totally, imploring them to ‘Stay.’

Then, the last, and perhaps worst of all. Half man, half shark. The Sharkey. Do. Not. Fuck. With. Him. The Sharkey’s feeding frenzy is as fast as it is final. Job done. A total massacre.

No one has spotted the two crash-helmeted spectators in the doorway. Li Long Chang knows he’s discovered the generals needed to set his Banquet of Evil in motion, and amid the aftermath he removes his skid-lid and steps out of the darkness, offering the gang power beyond their imaginations, utterly beguiling in all his menace and splendour. Cyril and his mutants really cannot believe that yet another dicklicker is going to try and interrupt them. Piping up through his Tesco’s gimp mask. “Take over the world? You and what army?” In direct answer, Li Long reanimates the corpses of the fallen Scotsmen. The gang of superfreaks are in.

MAD FOR FOOTIE

Fuck my old boots, we are so fucked. You know what I said about not needing to rehearse? Well, that was a fountain of horseshit bunged up with a bucket of let’s pretend. Bullshitting yourself on this level is not so much sticking your head in the sand as sticking your head in Sly and Robbie’s bass bins during the second encore of Boops. That’s me right now. The eardrums of my posturing are burst and the throbbing bass has taken up residence in my arsehole. If only it was a Sly and Robbie gig, though. That would be brilliant. Instead, I’m backstage at a grand, purportedly spectacular event involving, here, let me read from the press release, “The triumph of humanity’s spirit in the face of nuclear catastrophe, the apex of global athleticism, and a chance for the human race to look the Grim Reaper in the eye and say not yet you weird old tosser.” I added that last bit. It’s meant to be a chance to

neatly summarise the post-nuke U.K. zeitgeist to an audience of over three billion, and since the last time anyone saw U2 they were dragging their hanging, irradiated skin down the Old Kent Road, I suppose Terry and I have got to fill in.

So this is it: A World Cup Terry and Whitey vs. The Freebies-themed opening ceremony. Some poor sod is buckling up a harness over my Whitey Action getup and it’s riding right up my front bottom. A famous designer made me a costume for this event, and it’s basically the clothes I used to wear two years ago. And it’s not just me. There’s a veritable sea of stage school stand-in Whiteys too, all dressed in the same clobber. Red wigs and Utility Pants as far as the eye can see. I notice some intern taping their boobs down, and it hits me. They’re not dressed like me. They’re dressed as the me you see in toys, TV pilots, and the costumes bought for little girls the world over. Those kids’ parties must be a nightmare.

Phoo Action Pilot Heroes & Villains

On-set press photography, digitally enhanced 2006/2022

LOVELY JUBLEE

SUPER DELUXE EDITION

The Super Deluxe clamshell edition includes all of the exclusive elements of the Deluxe, and more, in a handnumbered and signed limited run of 500. Exclusively From Forbidden Planet & Another Universe.

Limited to only 500 copies! The Super Deluxe Edition is an over-sized essential for collectors. Housed within a beautifully designed cloth clamshell case it includes three exclusive embroidered patches, five limited-edition giclée art prints, original scripts on specially printed paper stock, gatefolds and a tip-in page – numbered and hand-signed by Hewlett and Wakeham.

Hewlett and Wakeham’s iconic, remastered and re-lettered comic strips take centre stage in the deluxe editions of Phoo Action: Silver Jubilee, a definitive collection encompassing artist’s edition artwork, comics, stories, prose, storyboards, and behind-the-scenes material from the franchise.

For fans of the cult-classic Tank Girl, The Face, BRIT and Grammy-winning band Gorillaz and Phoo Action, this Silver Jubilee Super Deluxe Edition is the collector’s crown jewel of subversive, satirical and surreal crime-fighting.

INCLUDES; Exclusive Prints & Patches, 3 x 75mm embroidered cloth patches, 5 x limited edition giclée prints, 235 x 293mm, 300gsm Tintoretto Gesso, four-colour printed envelope, housed in a clamshell box. SPECIFICATIONS; Book Exterior Dimensions: 246 x 303mm, spine width: 37.5mm, 464 pages, quarter-bound cloth spine, foiled in black, scuff free matt lamination, spot gloss raised UV varnish, silver gilded page edges. BOOK INTERIOR; Tip-In Page. Numbered and hand-signed by Hewlett & Wakeham, 120gsm Zen paper. Main paper: 140gsm matt art plus, script pages: 120gsm wood-free, double and single gatefolds, remastered Get the Freebies comics, unseen process art, 70,000-word prose story, scripts, storyboards, behind-the-scenes and complete history of the IP over five chapters, including comics, adaptations and publishing

Super Deluxe Edition

Cloth clamshell case, custom envelope, 3 x limited edition embroidered patches, 5 x giclée art prints, cloth spine, silvergilded page edging, foil and spot UV finishing 2024

above

Super Deluxe Edition

Book Exterior, quarter-bound cloth spine, foiled in black, scuff free matt lamination, spot gloss raised UV varnish, silver gilded page edges. Dimensions: 246 x 303mm, spine width: 37.5mm, 464 pages

2024

Super Deluxe Edition

Tip-In Page, numbered and hand-signed by Hewlett & Wakeham, 120gsm Zen paper 2024

Super Deluxe

5 x limited edition giclée Tintoretto Gesso, four-colour

Super Deluxe Exclusive Patches

3 x 75mm embroidered cloth patches 2024

Super Deluxe Edition

Main paper: 140gsm matt art plus, script pages: 120gsm wood-free, double and single gatefolds.

2024

Deluxe Edition

Quarter-bound cloth spine, foiled in black, scuff free matt lamination, spot gloss raised UV varnish.

Dimensions: 246 x 303mm, spine width: 37.5mm, 464 pages 2024

The Deluxe slipcase edition includes three exclusive giclee art prints in a four-colour printed sleeve, hardbound with a cloth spine, silver gilded page edges and speciality paper stocks.

The Deluxe Edition is a must-have for collectors and fans, with extra features including exclusive giclée art prints, original scripts on specially printed paper stock, exciting gatefolds, and a sleek slipcase to present Jamie Hewlett’s signature graphic style and Mat Wakeham’s design and narrative mastery in all its intended glory.

Whether you’re a Phoo Action enthusiast, Gorillaz fanatic, ‘The Face’ admirer, or a collector seeking an extraordinary addition to your shelf, Phoo Action: Silver Jubilee Deluxe Edition delivers all this and more.

INCLUDES; Exclusive Prints, 3 x limited edition giclée prints, 235 x 293mm, 300gsm Tintoretto Gesso, four-colour printed sleeve, housed in a slipcase. SPECIFICATION; Book Exterior, Dimensions: 246 x 303mm, spine width: 37.5mm, 464 pages, quarter-bound cloth spine, foiled in black, scuff free matt lamination, spot gloss raised UV varnish, silver gilded page edges. BOOK INTERIOR; Main paper: 140gsm matt art plus, script pages: 120gsm wood-free, double and single gatefolds, remastered Get the Freebies comics, unseen process art, 70,000-word prose story, scripts, storyboards, behind-the-scenes and complete history of the IP over five chapters, including comics, adaptations and publishing

Deluxe Edition

Printed cloth slipcase 3 x limited edition giclée prints, four-colour printed sleeve, cloth spine, silver-gilded page edging, foil and spot UV finishing 2024

Deluxe Edition Prints

3 x limited edition giclée prints, 235 x 293mm, 300gsm

Tintoretto Gesso 2024

Deluxe Edition

Quarter-bound cloth spine, foiled in black, scuff free matt lamination, spot gloss raised UV varnish, silver gilded page edges. Dimensions: 246 x 303mm, spine width: 37.5mm, 464 pages, 2024

Deluxe Edition

Main paper: 140gsm matt art plus, script pages: 120gsm wood-free, double and single gatefolds. 2024

Inked Comics Panels

Pencil and ink on artboard 1996/1997/2023

phoo_action | titancomics phooaction | comicstitan actionphoo | comicstitan

© Jamie Hewlett and Matthew Wakeham. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Names, characters, places and incidents featured in this publication are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

Published by Titan Comics

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd. 144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

A CIP catalogue for this title is available from the British Library.

First Edition: July 2024 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in China.

For rights information contact: jenny.boyce@titanemail.com phooaction.com | titan-comics.com

Super Deluxe Edition: 9781787743441

Deluxe Edition: 9781787743458

"This book is absolutely stunning."

Near Mint Condition

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