#ipc magazines

Scream! #13 (1984)

“The old team.”

Doomsday - series 02 - 2006

Shiver and Shake was a British comic magazine published every Monday by IPC Magazines Ltd. It ran from 10th March 1973 to 5th October 1974. The overall theme of the strips were comically spooky.

Shiver and Shake was two publications in one; Shake being a pull-out section from Shiver.

The main star of Shiver was a ghost of the same name who appeared in the strip The Duke’s Spook.

2000 AD Prog 308: Tharg's Time Twisters: "The Reversible Man"

Story Credits

Writer: Alan Moore

Art: Mike White

Letters: Peter Knight

Editorial Team

Editor: Steve McManus

Action presents a thrilling new series set in the dystopian future year of 1999!

Front cover of: Action Comic - 8th May, 1976 IPC Magazines, Ltd.

When you hear the ‘politics have no place in comics crowd’, you wonder if they have ever read anything British. Well, actually, you wonder if they have actually read anything ever, or if their comprehension skills really that bad, but anyway...

The Thirteenth Floor is great for some good old social justice, where anyone trying to take advantage of the tenants is going to find themselves on the titular level, and given a lesson to encourage them to mend their ways. Like Misty’s The Sentinels (another series collected under the Treasury of British Comics banner), tower blocks have clear social significance in terms of who lives there and what sort of problems they face. Here, though, Max is the gleaming technological future of housing, rather than the rundown, abandoned and haunted spires of the Sentinel scheme. Both have Thatcherism haunting their ink, though. In this second chapter of the series, a debt collector, who refuses to show any sympathy for a family fallen on hard times, finds himself in a Pac-Man-esque maze scenario (probably the height of video game tech at the time!), being chased down by bowler hat and umbrella adorned figures, digital depictions of fat cats determined to ‘squeeze dry’ the working class, regardless of their circumstances. No politics to see here, ladies and gents....

Ortiz's art is great at capturing whatever nightmare the 13th floor decides to generate- computer games, bugs, urban blight, city streets and wild animals are all featured, and nothing seems beyond his skills at capturing the right level of horror and surprise in each scenario. He also manages to evoke some sympathy for the ‘victims’, so that we might wonder if Max is going a little too far at times, even when we might feel some visceral satisfaction in the poetic justice of his punishments.

Although Scream was short-lived, Max found a new home in Eagle, so fortunately there is more to come in this series. Wagner and Grant realised that there was a probably limited mileage in the ‘punishment of the week’ format, and introduced plot threads regarding Max’s plans (or at least the consequences of them) coming to the attention of the authorities, which raises the stakes and gives us more reason to come back for the next episode. Or next volume, in this case, whenever it might be due...