The Thirteenth Floor Volume One

While my own Golden Age of comics was the late Sixties and early Seventies, I kept in touch with comics and was still reading the likes of Eagle in the mid- to late-1980s, meaning that I had the pleasure of reading 'The Thirteenth Floor' each week as it appeared. Something odd happened in 1984 when Eagle was merged with Scream!, a comic I hadn't seen in the newsagents for months.

Normally a comic that did not find an audience when it was launched would be allowed around 22 weeks, giving it the opportunity to re-jig its contents with some new stories before the axe fell and the dying comic was prepared for merging. Scream! had been yanked off sale so quickly that it didn't go through the usual dying spasms and a couple of strips ('Monster', 'The Thirteenth Floor') were eventually moved to Eagle after a brief delay (most of that down to the six-week lead time required for printing and distribution). While 'Monster' lasted only seven months, 'The Thirteenth Floor' had a long and successful run in its new home until losing its place in March 1987 during one of the regular revamps that comics would go through.

What made 'The Thirteenth Floor' so memorable? The set-up for the strip was that Max, an AI that controlled the Maxwell Tower residential towerblock, went to any length to serve and protect his tenants. This included creating a thirteenth floor – the number usually missing from towerblocks for superstitious reasons – to which anyone threatening the peace and tranquility of the building or its residents was taken. A little like the Next Generation holodeck, Max was able to create scenarios to torment, torture or otherwise warn off his captives.

I think Ian Rimmer nails it in his introduction. While the basic premise would have carried the story for quite a few months, writers Alan Grant and John Wagner (using the pen-name Ian Holland) were concerned about repeating the "wrong-doer scare witless into reforming" story too often, and instead "set about devising a far-reaching narrative arc to drive the story forward."

Max is the narrator of these stories, so we are able to delve into his motivations; we see how much he cares for his residents, monitoring their every action to make sure they are safe and secure. Kemp, a debt collector owed money by a new tenant, is the first victim of Max's thirteenth floor, the door's opening up so that Kemp is faced by the Grim Reaper and forced to play a computer game where losing lives proves fatal. And it does prove fatal: Kemp is found dead in the lift, apparently of a heart attack, although his face betrays that he was frightened to death.

Bullies, a crooked family of tenants, bailiffs, a hit-and-run driver, vandals, extortionists... all receive the thirteenth floor treatment while the police, in the shape of Detective Sergeant Ingram, begin to suspect that the number of incidents they are called out to at Maxwell Tower tell a story that they need to investigate. And when Jerry Knight, the building supervisor, begins to suspect that something's wrong with Max, things get even messier.

While the stories rattle along and take some imaginative and delightfully surreal turns, it is the artwork by Jose Ortiz that makes this volume a must-have. Grant & Wagner threw everything into the mix, victims of the thirteenth floor emerging into the Arctic one week and Hell the next, with everything intricately delineated by Ortiz.

With Halloween fast approaching, this is the perfect book for any child in your life, even if it's just your own inner-child. It has scares, laughs, intrigue, and it's hugely entertaining.

The Thirteenth Floor Vol.01 by John Wagner, Alan Grant & Jose Ortiz. Rebellion ISBN 9781781086537, 18 October 2018, 175pp, £14.99. Available via Amazon.