Menace of
the Alpha Man was a suspense mystery tale that stretched
out for 18 weeks in issues 53 to 70 (March 9 - August 3, 1974) and was
the longest of all adventure serials in SHIVER AND SHAKE. Just as all but one
of them, it offered attentive readers a chance to win themselves some cash. The
illustrator was Eric Bradbury. This is how it was advertised in SHIVER AND
SHAKE issue No. 53 a week before the premiere:
Let’s take
a look at the plot. Doctor Frank Carter was a scientist at Greystone Research
Laboratories – a top-secret research establishment in the Scottish Highlands,
who had just finished developing a secret and dangerous formula. The scientist
was on a rock-climbing trip with his daughter Penny when he was abducted and
kidnapped by a masked muscular villain who called himself Alpha
Man and wore a chequered skin-tight costume decorated with
letter symbols. Alpha Man was after the secret invention but as he was taking Doctor
Carter away in his Chinook-type helicopter, the scientist managed to pass the
reel with the formula to his daughter and told her to save it no matter what.
Jamie Robertson, a local 16 year old lad, came to Penny’s rescue and saved her
from the menacing Alpha Man. The two formed a team. The girl knew her father
had been expecting the ‘international crook’ to come after him and remembered how
once he had told her that if anything happened to him, a letter in his desk
would explain everything and tell her what to do. Jamie and Penny found the letter and this is
what it said:
The villain
sure had a manic fixation on letters! Although this wasn’t in the letter, Penny
somehow knew they had to collect eight letters and arrange them into a man’s
name consisting of two four-letter words.
As the
story developed over the weeks, the two youngsters survived a series of vicious
and crafty plots and attacks by Alpha Man and slowly collected the letters that
they needed to reveal the name of the villainous crook and confront him in the
final show-down. Strange as it may sound, the more letters they collected, the
longer their list of suspects became. It
included Major Bret Shaw, head of security at Greystone Laboratories
(Penny remembered how he and her father took an instant dislike to each other
when they first met and how he was always prying into Dad’s work)...
... Bert Gash,
the local poacher and the least suspicious of the lot...
... Herb Sant, toy
shop owner in the little fishing village of Tannoch where Jamie’s home was and
where most of the action took place; he became a suspect because of his name
and also because one of Alpha Man’s attacks came in the form of nasty
mechanical toys...
... and Thab
Rees, the caretaker of the sinister Tannoch castle (a very aggressive type who
hated kids snooping around the ruins)...
The list of
suspects became complete in issue 63 when the young heroes were still two
letters away from the set of eight. Here is how their list looked:
Jamie and
Penny got their last letter in this thrilling ghost-packed episode in issue 68:
It was high
time to announce the WHO IS THE ALPHA MAN? competition:
In the next
issue (No. 69) Jamie and Penny found out the name of the villain (but didn’t share
it with readers of SHIVER AND SHAKE who were busy sending in their competition
entries). They realised they had to catch him red-handed with that infernal
costume of his. Jamie decided time had come to use the secret formula so he put
Doctor Carter’s reel into a battery-operated cassette player, hoping to use it
against Alpha Man. The scene of the final show-down was set at the sinister Tannoch
castle. In the last episode (in the issue cover-dated August 3rd, 1974 that came out after a four-weeks’ interruption due to
industrial action) the two youngsters demonstrated the effect of the top-secret
formula, exposed the true identity of Alpha Man and rescued Penny’s Dad from captivity:
The list of
clue words and names of the lucky prize-winners were printed in issue 76:
Five years
later the strip was reprinted in CHEEKY WEEKLY comic (issue dates from 3rd
March till 30th June, 1979).
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