DOCTOR DITKO WILL SEE YOU NOW...

Copyright MARVEL COMICS

When STEVE DITKO was at the top of his game, he was hard to beat.  His later cartoony RANDIAN rants leave me cold, both in the art and 'story' departments, but his reputation as a legend is secure because of his SPIDER-MAN, DOCTOR STRANGE, CREEPY, EERIE, CHARLTON, and early ATLAS/MARVEL work.

I'm too lazy to look up where the accompanying tale was first published, but this printing comes from the UK title, SECRETS Of The UNKNOWN #161, published by ALAN CLASS & Co.  If you're an aspiring comicbook artist, look and see how it's done. 

SECRETS OF THE UNKNOWN - REVEALED!

Cover art copyright MARVEL COMICS

Regular readers may remember me telling the story of how I once gifted a friend all of my ALAN CLASS comics sometime in the late '70s.  Not too long after, I reclaimed one back from him, but that apart, he owned all of them for just over 30 years, whereupon (unsolicited by me) he gave most of them back to me.  At least one was missing, and I knew it was missing because I remembered the cover and sitting on a bench to pore over the contents on my way home from the hospital shop where I'd bought it (the comic, not the bench).

Anyway, I recently managed to obtain a replacement for the missing issue, and have just finished adding it to a cover gallery of Alan Class comics that I posted a few years back.  However, unless you go looking for it, you won't see it, so I thought I'd also show the cover here for your convenience.  Originally, the Class titles had 68 pages, and the same issues that first came out in the '60s were reprinted in the '70s and '80s, though with a reduced page-count of 52, which meant some stories had to be omitted.

It's a safe bet that the '60s version of the above comic contained The MAGIC Of MORDOO as mentioned in the jaggy cover blurb, but it's missing in the '70s incarnation.  You'd think they'd have left that one in and omitted another tale, but someone obviously wasn't paying proper attention at the selection-for-rejection stage.  Although the interior printing is pretty poor, it has a couple of JACK KIRBY illustrated stories, plus another half-dozen tales, three of which are illustrated by STEVE DITKO, two being MYSTERIOUS TRAVELLER strips, of which there are four altogether.

It's always possible that I'm forgetting a few, but I reckon I've now got just about every Alan Class title I ever owned, bar one.  (CREEPY WORLDS #130, which I bought in 1972 or '73.)  I now have 14 issues altogether, 12 of them being my original copies I bought as a teenager (though, as I said, there was a 30-odd year gap in my possession of them), and once I track down that absent issue mentioned above (at a reasonable price hopefully), I'll be able to write 'finis' to that particular chapter in my life.  (Update: Now got it.)

Or maybe I'll buy a few more.  I'm sure there must be issues out there that I'd have bought had I known about them at the time.  Have you got a favourite Alan Class title?  Why not reminisce about it in the comments section?

ATTENTION! CALLING ALL ALAN CLASS COMICS COLLECTORS AND EXPERTS... (Updated AGAIN)

Images copyright relevant owner

Back in the 1960s, while I was yet a mere youth, I read a b&w reprint of the above story in an ALAN CLASS comic.  For years, I associated it with the '60s version of SINISTER TALES #149, but when I acquired a new printing of it around the mid-'70s (yup, that's the very ish below), I was disappointed to discover that I'd either been mistaken, or the story had been omitted in a reduced page-count, cost-cutting exercise.  (As you'll know, Class reissued the same comics over the years, with only the price changed, 'all-new stories' blurbs omitted, and fewer pages.  Sometimes the issues were given a different numbering as well.)

If the reprint didn't originally appear in this issue, then it seems likely that I read two different comics (one after the other) on the same evening on a visit to a then-former-neighbour's house, which is why I connect the story to this cover in my memory banks.  So the question is, Class collectors, do any of you know exactly which AC comic the story was originally reprinted in if it wasn't this one?  After all, I can't track it down 'til I know which ish it was.  Any and all assistance will be much appreciated by your grateful host.

Go on, help me reunite with another item from my past before I finally fall off the twig.  (You'll feel good about yourself.)

(Update 1:  Thanks to NORMAN BOYD, who provided a link, I now know that it was an L. MILLER comic called SPELLBOUND [#62] that the tale was reprinted in, not an Alan Class one.  Their mags were in the same b&w format, so are easy to confuse in memory years after the fact.  You can see the cover below, in which DEATH has been altered from his skeletal US presentation.)

(Update 2:  Alan Class purchased the inventory of L. Miller in 1963, including the printing plates which Miller had used to produce their comics, so I suppose there's always a possibility that Class could have reprinted the above tale in one of their own mags.  Anyone out there know if it ever turned up in an AC comic?)