Seaboard Periodicals was started by former Marvel publisher Martin Goodman in 1972, who hired two key people to run his Atlas brand: Jeff Rovin, who had edited Warren's magazines (and would write the aforementioned Encyclopedia of Super-Heroes), and Stan's brother Larry Lieber. Goodman wanted to break into the DC/Marvel near-monopoly, but his insistence that the magazine guy (Rovin) handle the comics and the comics guy (Lieber) handle the magazines was, according to both editors, wrong-headed, and helped bring about the line's collapse by 1975. But in many ways, this failed experiment was a first try at what Image Comics became in the 1990s.
Now, of course, Image was founded by comics artists with a profit-sharing, independent streak that was unknown in the 1970s. Atlas was still work-for-hire. But Goodman still offered the highest rates in the industry, the return of original artwork, and author rights to original characters, policies that would help attract a lot of top talent, including Neal Adams, Steve Ditko, Russ Heath, Alex Toth, Wally Wood, and up-and-comers like Howard Chaykin. So more respect for creators was part of the brand, even if it wasn't run BY the creatives.
What made it even more like early Image is that much of its titles felt like copies of Marvel characters. Image had a bunch of X-Men clones, Pitt was Hulk, Spawn was pretty original but looked like Spider-Man... generally, many of the artists just seemed to recycle the Marvel books they had just quit to form the company. Atlas had its own Hulk in the Brute, but would also have its own Conan in Iron Jaw, it's own Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos in Blazing Battle Tales, its own Satana in Devilina, its own Shang-Chi in Hands of the Dragon, and so on. After the collapse, some of the more original strips were taken back to Marvel under new guises too - Chaykin's Scorpion became Dominic Fortune, and Rich Buckler's Demon Hunter became Devil-Slayer.
But it WAS the 70s, and comics were in a slump. It was a time of throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck, and Atlas, like the Big Two, was trying everything: Superheroes, humor, horror, war, science-fiction, fantasy, westerns... And that no doubt also contributed to its failure. Image, in the booming 90s, would fare much better regardless of the relative quality of ITS titles, and go on to become one of the Big Three. The world wasn't ready for Altas. But pick up any assortment of their comics and black and white magazines, and you'll find a bunch of names you recognize from the Silver and Bronze Ages, even pros still working today. So it has to be acknowledged.
Since my Mondays have fallen into a theme of the month, let April be Atlas Month. Over the next few weeks, I'll grab an old Atlas comic and see if it was worth our time, or if it was rightly relegated to the oubliettes.
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