Alan Class Publishing

Alan Class Publishing was a small British publishing company owned by Alan Class (obviously) which between 1959 and 1989 published approximately 1455 comics under 26 different titles, most of them squarebound anthologies reprinting material from numerous American publishers including Timely Comics, Atlas Comics (1950s), Charlton Comics, Red Circle, Fawcett, Archie, King Features, ACG and Marvel. A huge amount of material by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and countless pre-Marvel short stories by Stan Lee were reprinted (some of them several times over in different books), notably in six long running core titles: Astounding Stories, Sinister Tales, Suspense, Creepy Worlds, Uncanny Tales and Secrets of the Unknown, but also in shorter lived titles including Blazing Trails, Journey into Danger, Secrets of the Underworld and the somewhat misleadingly titled Uncensored Love(!) None of the books were dated (a deliberate ploy to extend their shelf life), and unsolds were returned to Class only to be reissued a few months later, typically in the school holidays. Most issues featured a more or less random selection of material, often including stories from several different publishers in one book (issues of Suspense, for instance, featuring both Spider-Man and Archie's Fly-Man) though short, one-off science fiction or horror stories tended to be the preferred fare, and where characters such as Nick Fury, Thor, the Jaguar or Captain Atom appeared, it was invariably in single stories, no storylines being continued from one issue to the next. In 1963, Class bought the rights to the back catalogue of L. Miller & Son, publishers of Marvelman, but by the late sixties they had lost the rights to reprint material from most of the larger publishers (including Marvel) and were sued by King Features for reprinting their copyrighted material without permission. Unlicensed reprints continued to appear however, including Marvel material, since the company was so small (and, of course, not based in the US) that they pretty much went unnoticed most of the time, eventually ceasing to trade in 1989 purely because Class could not compete with the rising number of specialist comic shops.