The Atlas Line of Superstars!

Over the past year or two as my son has become more and more interested in comic books, we have traveled to various comics shows and such and there, largely in the 50 cent bins, I find pretty well preserved issues of comics published by Atlas Comics in the mid-'70's. For those of you who have been paying attention, I wrote an entry awhile back about traveling to 7-11 to buy comic books in the early years of my own collecting frenzy. Well, Atlas was part of that.

To tell the background of Atlas in a nutshell: when Martin Goodman, the original publisher of Marvel Comics, retired in the early '70's, he did so with the belief or understanding that his son Chip would take over. But when this didn't happen -- and eventually Smilin' Stan Lee got the gig -- Martin became angry and decided to start a rival comic book company to get revenge on his old company. He even named it with the same name Marvel had prior to 1961. In 1974 and '75, Goodman aggressively launched a cadre of new titles, almost all of which were direct rip-offs of Marvel titles, and none of which lasted more than four issues. Some of the last published issues have ads for the story in the next - which shows how fast the end must've come. The story of why that happened is told best on the very extensive and well-done website you will find by clicking the Atlas Comics link under "Comics" over in the Boom Tubes.

Some of the best creators in comics history went to work for the doomed company -- Howard Chaykin, Steve Ditko, Neal Adams, Pablo Marcos, Ernie Colon, to name a few -- and no comic book company pushed the envelope on sex and violence the way Atlas did, while still managing to stay under the auspices of the then-still-powerful Comics Code Authority. In the end, hubris, poor business decisions, and bad distribution did Atlas in.

Somehow, a handful of Atlas issues made it to the convenience stores of Milwaukie, and I picked them up. Two among them were The Grim Ghost and another was Weird Suspense featuring the Tarantula. The Grim Ghost was a Revolutionary War-era brigand who was killed, went to Hell, and returned to Earth by Satan to gather more evil souls for the pit. The Tarantula was Count Lykos, heir to an ancient legacy that turned male members of his family into blood sucking arachnid people. My parents decided that Atlas Comics were not a good thing for a nine year old boy to be reading, and for one of the few times in my young comic book reading career, forbade me to read them. Its lucky for me Atlas went out of business shortly thereafter, and I didn't have to gaze longingly on that which I could not have....

But the heart does not forget what has been forbidden to it, so now I am becoming an Atlas completist -- a relatively easy thing to do, since only about 50 issues were ever printed, plus, as I said, they're usually in the cheap-o bins at the comics shows -- I even have an issue of the particularly nasty Weird Suspense, with Count Lykos in all his flesh eating glory.

Most of Atlas is, well, not great -- not usually bad, though, either, just so derivative that you feel like you've seen it all before, over at Marvel. A few concepts and characters shine through -- Howard Chaykin's The Scorpion, a '30's noir adventure book, was brilliant, and there's goofy fun to be had in the Conan ripoff Iron Jaw and the Fahrenheit 451/Invasion of the Body Snatchers mash-up Morlock 2001, and art cropping up all over from the aforementioned stalwarts.

I've heard the rumor that Chip Goodman still owns the rights to the Atlas Line of Superstars and will sell them for low-six-figures....if I ever come into big money I might seek him out and become a comics mogul myself! Ah, dreams......