Yet more Creepy Worlds of Alan Class.

Hi, gang, it's that wonderful time of year again, when the wise man makes like a Beach Boy, grabs his surf board and heads for where the palm trees sway, the girls are tanned and the breakers are as high as houses.

Grimsby.

But such seaside antics can mean only one thing; stopping off at the coach station kiosk to stock up on comics for yet another delve into the Creepy Worlds of Alan Class.

But first, a warning to the unwary. Here be spoilers....

We kick off with a fine upstanding couple who find they've won a house in a competition they never entered.

Being fine and upstanding, it's not long before they're conned out of the house by a pair of crooks but, before the dastardly duo can celebrate their triumph, the house blasts off into outer space - with them trapped inside it - revealing itself to be a spaceship placed on Earth to capture two specimens of the human race. The best thing about this tale is the hero seems pathologically incapable of removing the pipe from his mouth. I miss the good old days when you could instantly spot the good guy because he was the one pumping more toxic gases into the atmosphere than the rest of the Western World combined.

Next up's the tale of a washed-up magician who, after being sacked from his latest gig, roams the streets of  his unnamed town and reflects on the days when he had audiences eating from his palms. While he's at it, he inadvertently thwarts a hold-up by making some real magic happen but is so wrapped up in self-pity, he never notices.

Our third tale brings us a test pilot who's more than a little concerned about where all this fancy new technology's leading us.

Like he should have worried. Upon flying faster than the speed of sound, he lands in the future and discovers it's a lovely place, full of happy smiley people, then returns to the present, relieved that the years to come will be so lovely and fluffy. Just as much as I miss pipe-smoking heroes, I miss the days when it was possible to time travel by going faster than the speed of sound.

Next up's the tale of a ruthless racing driver who, after causing the death of a rival finds himself on a strange circuit he's never seen before, chased by the cars of dead drivers. Escaping from this nightmare sees him learning to smile for the first time ever. Given that the story starts with him killing a man, you'd have hoped the Dark Powers would've set out to teach him a slightly better lesson in life than how to smile. I suppose this shows why I'll never be one of the Dark Powers and have to leave such things to my glove puppet Crikey.

Now we move on to a sea captain with a knack for leading his men into danger only for it to always dissipate in the nick of time. At the tale's climax, we discover he's the son of Neptune, on a mission to throw loads of dosh his dad's way before being reclaimed by him. It's not what you could call a riveting read but the story's main charm is at its conclusion when various characters directly address the reader.

From the sea to the land, as we encounter a hard-up bloke who doesn't want to sell his island just to keep his nagging girlfriend happy. While he's lying around on that island, waiting for a prospective buyer to arrive, a bunch of olde-style pirates turn up with a beauteous female captive. Our normally laid-back hero defeats them and rescues the girl - only to wake and discover it was all a dream.

But then, miracle of miracles, it turns out his island's prospective buyer's the girl from the dream. It's a tale rather nicely drawn by Angelo Torres who I've never heard anything about but, going on his work in this and the previous Creepy Worlds I've reviewed on here, he had more than a little style about him.

Next, a pilot repeatedly dreams of a man with home-made wings who keeps plummeting from the sky and having to be rescued by him. It turns out he's only dreaming he's a pilot and he is in fact Leonardo DaVinci.

Now we get a Nazi war criminal who tries to steal a growth formula from his young assistant but gets his comeuppance when the walls close in on him. It's a slightly baffling tale and I'm not sure whether its climactic events are supposed to be only taking place in the war criminal's head or not. I do know he's got a strange approach to logic, being under the impression that putting a snake out in cold weather will make it disappear, rather than just causing it to lie around dead.

Then there's the tale of old Ben Parker, who's no relation as far as I know to Peter Parker's ill-fated uncle. Instead he has a dull life operating the points on an underground railway. One night he returns home to find a mysterious stranger's out to show him the sights of the world. Parker awakes, two days later, to discover it was all a dream .

Or was it?

Next, in a tale credited to Joe Sinnott, a cop wishes his life was different and then, when he gets his wish, spends all his time wishing his life was like it'd been in the first place. Some people're never satisfied.

Finally we get probably the best thought-out tale of the issue in which a greedy explorer decides to kidnap a mysterious old Oriental man who reputedly has the secret of immortality. But first he has to get past the old man's son. It's only when the explorer gets back to civilisation that he discovers the man he thought was the son is actually the one with the secret of immortality and that he's gone to all that trouble to bring the wrong man back. D'oh!

And so ends yet another journey into all the terror and intrigue that Grimsby can handle.

Well, admittedly, terror's a bit thin on the ground in this comic, and a fair chunk of the tales are more light-hearted than tense but, overall, I think that, thanks to its sheer quaintness, the story of the couple being swindled out of their house is my favourite. The tale being uncredited, I don't know if it was drawn by Don Heck but, if not, it certainly should've been. An honourable mention should go to the Angelo Torres illustrated story. Although it's a pretty  limp tale, it has by far the best art of the issue.

The Creepy Worlds of Alan Class.

If there's anything I associate with childhood coach trips it's the competition to see who could be the first to spot a sheep. Sadly, as my sheep-spotting blog's yet to take shape, I'll have to talk about the other thing I associate with such journeys, and that's Alan Class. For some of us, no 1970s' coach trip was complete without first stopping off to buy at least two or three of the things to read on the journey.

Of course, at the time I didn't know the odd-looking comics were published by Alan Class. I didn't find out who he was until the early 1990s when I saw an article about him and his work in the now long-defunct Comic World magazine but, with their short, fat pages and black and white reprints of what were obviously ancient tales, I knew such books must all be the product of one company.

Where those reprints came from was anyone's guess, as Alan Class comics weren't dated and gave no copyright information whatsoever. Some weren't even numbered, bearing instead mysterious letters to signify who-knew-what?

We kick off with a thief who, fleeing the cops, hides in a museum. When he recognises everything in the display room, he concludes that in a past life he must've been the famously nice pharaoh who's on display and, realising what a good person he once was, gives himself up. The twist at the end of this tale's great as we find out he's got it completely wrong and, as a child, he was once trapped overnight in the same exhibition room, becoming so traumatised by the experience that it turned him bad. Apparently it'd taken his psychiatrists years to help him forget about it.

Next, a witch takes revenge on a bunch of pirates who killed her husband, by shrinking them down and putting them in cages. It's a nicely macabre tale of the type I always associate with Alan Class, let down only by a lame last panel.

In a tale that feels like pure Stan Lee - although no writer's credited - a Western scientist's kidnapped by that well-known communist state of Uralia and forced to create for them the ultimate weapon. Needless to say he then uses the weapon to deliver them to justice - ie, the West. For some reason everyone in Uralia has a sign hanging from his neck featuring what's presumably the nation's symbol.

Next is a story of pure bafflement. After getting too big for its boots, the Earth's trapped in an ice age, dying, after all the other planets in the solar system ganged up on it and attacked it in an act of preemptive self-defence. Now the survivors contemplate whether to invade a planet in a far-off solar system in order to save themselves. When they vote no, the sun comes out, the ice age at an end. It seems God's rewarding them for doing the right thing, although it's never actually stated. I suspect it's the sort of tale that would've gone down better in 1950s America than in the more cynical land of 1970s Britain.

In our next story, a criminal takes refuge in a lab and decides to escape justice by using the matter transporter he finds there. The twist is that it's not a matter transporter at all. It's a time machine and he finds himself trapped in the age of the dinosaurs. I have to say the artwork on this tale is at times lovely. According to the Grand Comics Database, it's drawn by someone called Angelo Torres who I have to admit to knowing nothing about. Judging by this outing, the failing's clearly mine rather than his.

Next up, a man searches for pirate treasure, unaware the isle he's searching for it on is one of a whole bunch of floating islands that move around at random and is therefore not the one marked on his map.

Now, we're back to being a bit odd as a lonely man up a mountain meets a version of himself from a more advanced dimension - and his babe of a girlfriend. "Why oh why oh why can't I have a babe of a girlfriend like that?" he asks himself - although not necessarily in those words - and, wouldn't you know it, promptly bumps into this dimension's version of her.

After this, a greedy inventor's robots manage to make the entire population of his town redundant. It's only when he's sentenced to jail for a minor offense, by the robot judge he created, that he discovers the error of his ways and realises human emotions are more important than mechanical efficiency. I realised this lesson long ago which is why I choose to be over-emotional and hopelessly inefficient at all times.

Now, mankind's first encounter with aliens ends in a twist that anyone familiar with Farewell to the Master can see coming a mile away.

Speaking of being over-emotional and inefficient, a film director dumps his star who takes the news well by killing herself before returning from the dead to make another movie for him. You have to say that for a Hollywood superstar to kill herself because a director wants to make a movie with another actress seems a little extreme. I'd have thought she'd have been better off just calling her agent.

Three scientists discover a power that could make them all-powerful and then, one by one, disappear from the face of the Earth for no good reason. The message of this tale being there are some things man was never meant to know.

Finally, in a story so packed solid with plot holes that it's more hole than plot, a man desperate to impress the woman he loves uses the power of invisibility to make a fortune, only to discover he's gone back in time, she's not yet been born, and his money's now worthless. The thing's drawn by a young John Romita Sr and, although it's noticeably different from the style we'd later become used to, we can still see the familiar Romita ways showing through.

So there you have it, what feels like eighty five million stories packed into one square bound comic. Bearing in mind its cheap and cheerful nature and its use of stories that were old when Stonehenge was young, I was expecting not to be impressed by my adult re-acquaintance with it but I actually like a number of the tales, and the artwork appeals to me more than I thought it would. Plus, no one can deny Alan Class gave you value for money. In an age when they keep bringing back the icons of our youth, will we really have to wait forever for them to bring back the might and majesty of Alan Class?