The story
Alan Class (born in London, England, 21 July 1937) began as an importer of remaindered copies of American movie, romance, and detective magazines for UK distribution. (After World War II, the U.K. was intent on promoting homegrown publishers, and thus banned the direct importation of American periodicals.)
To avoid the cost, supply, and importation difficulties he had encountered, in 1958 Class set up a publishing business, Alan Class and Co. Ltd, to produce his own magazines, and entered into an agreement with an American comic and comic strip syndication company for the rights to reproduce U.S. comic books and strips under their control for a U.K audience. (Coincidentally, in 1959, the U.K. lifted the previous ban on importing foreign publications.)
The company's first offering was the one-shot Race for the Moon (1959), anthologizing Harvey science fiction reprints. Other one-shots and short series followed, and in the summer of 1962, the first of the Alan Class core titles, Creepy Worlds debuted; followed shortly thereafter by the debut of another long-running title, Secrets of the Unknown. Core titles Suspense Stories and Uncanny Tales debuted in 1963, Sinister Tales in 1964, and finally Astounding Stories in 1966.
In 1963, Alan Class bought the inventory of L. Miller & Son, Ltd., a UK publisher since the 1940s that had also reprinted many U.S. comics in black-and-white format. This purchase included the asbestos printing plates from which Miller had produced their comics. However, it is unclear what inventory titles this gave Alan Class. Many of the companies that Miller had published material from, such as Charlton and Fawcett, had already been reprinted by Class; and most of the Fawcett superhero material in which Miller had specialized — Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jr. and the rest of the Marvel Family especially — were not reprinted as a result of the long-running legal case between National/D.C. and Fawcett over Captain Marvel.
Alan Class Comics lost the right to its leased Marvel Comics characters after 1966, when Odhams Press began publishing its Power Comics line in January 1967, and licensed the Marvel Comics superheroes for their own titles. There was some overlap, with both companies reprinting Marvel superhero stories for some time. The available reprint material was reduced even further when, sometime between 1968 and 1971, King Features Syndicate sued Alan Class over publishing rights to its titles and characters, including The Phantom. As a result of this diminution of the accessible stories, by the early 1970s the Alan Class titles began to issue more and more reprints of material already printed in earlier issues.
Demise and legacy
By the late 1980s, slow sales and distribution problems, combined with the rise of the specialist comic shop and the decline of newsagent purchases, together with the easy availability of new U.S. comics and back issues, signaled the end of the line for the business. As Class himself said, "The reality was... costs were escalating, sales were falling — Marvels were on everybody's wish-list, and my comics were at 55p which I didn’t feel could be increased — enough was enough!"
Alan Class Comics shut down in 1989. During 30 years of publishing, the company produced 26 black-and-white anthology reprint titles comprising 1,472 individual issues (plus four issues of the Ally Sloper comic magazine).
On 15 May 2005, 30th Century Comics in London announced that it had obtained the rights to sell Alan Class's personal collection, including the original printing plates for the comics range.
From Wikipedia’s article on Alan Class Comics, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3