Tripwire Reviews Titan’s Phoo Action Super Deluxe Edition

A Slice Of 1990s Action

Tripwire’s contributing writer Tim Hayes takes a look at Titan’s Phoo Action Super Deluxe Edition…

Writer: Matt Wakeham
Artist: Jamie Hewlett
Titan Books

The Phoo Action Super Deluxe Edition is a very deep dive into a particular corner of late 1990s British comics and British culture, one that ran its course and then nearly came back big time and then didn’t. It’s also a dive into a period in the career of Jamie Hewlett, creator of the strip called Get the Freebies in the days just after the Tank Girl movie flopped taking Deadline magazine with it, and just before the cartoonist started designing and animating the members of the band Gorillaz. It’s also quite an expensive dive: the Phoo Action Super Deluxe Edition is a limited item priced at a nifty £350.00, although a cheaper slightly less super edition will be along shortly. But the price reflects the care and attention paid to this project by its instigator Mat Wakeham, long-time Hewlett collaborator and co-writer of the Phoo Action TV pilot eventually made by the BBC in 2008, working here as archivist and evangelist for a project that clearly meant a lot to him at the time and still does now.

The 400-page book is split roughly equally between the comics version of Get the Freebies and its Phoo Action TV incarnation. The first arrived in 1996 when a post-Tank Girl Hewlett pitched a strip to The Face magazine that would catch the mood of the moment, a culture all Britpop-ed and Prodigy-ed and cartoonish and electrified. Its story of the cool king-fu master named Terry Phoo and his accomplice Whitey Action, all sass and hot pants, ran for the 12 chapters reprinted here, starting with a suitably reflexive episode in which Hewlett pitches the strip within the strip itself. The art hoovers up Mad Magazine and manga and 2000AD and a lot else besides, a blast of creativity when UK comics were bursting with the stuff, given the deluxe treatment in this book and backed up by sketches, breakdowns and original pencils.

Then there was supposed to be a second set of comics stories, before a change of editors at The Face meant the plug was pulled; for those strips Wakeham includes not just the prepared outlines and designs but lengthy new prose adaptations, giving Whitey and Terry the novelisation that never came their way at the time. Jump ahead ten years and the BBC made its Phoo Action TV pilot, for which the book reproduces an entire script in full, plus a heap of Hewlett promotional images and photos, before also detailing what a further planned eight-episode series would have included. But that series didn’t happen either, due to a BBC change of heart and maybe the changing air of post-Blair Britain.

Any book that gathers up a pile of 1990s Jamie Hewlett art reminds you all over again how vivid that cartooning was, how the body language and facial expressions tell as much of a story as the words. By covering a roughly ten-year span the book also shows how Hewlett’s style changed once he was working with Gorillaz, since the 2008 art here is more textured, brooding and tense, throttled back on the frantic mayhem for a cool artistic sheen and a harsher vibe. But no one else would have drawn Terry and Whitey’s world the way Hewlett does, or could have.

Phoo Action Deluxe Edition is out from 3 December from Titan Books

Phoo Action Super Deluxe Edition is out now from Forbidden Planet (UK) and Another Universe (US).  Phoo Action Deluxe Edition is out 3 December from Titan Comics.