ATLAS (SHRUGS): part one

Some of us are old enough to have been part of the original Atlas Comics readership and frankly, some of us have got rose-tinted lenses in our see-behind glasses.

   

There’s no arguing that the original Atlas line had some superb creative talent working for it – Ditko, Wood and Chaykin are only the first three that come to mind – but there’s also no arguing that a great deal of the line, in common with a great deal of every other publisher’s line in the 1970s, was pretty much dross.

For all the talent that was toiling away at it, the Atlas line was incredibly restricted in its scope. Editorial mandates no doubt had a lot to do with this – we all know why the line was set up and how important it was to the man in charge that every item published had to be more Marvel than Marvel, and given how Marvel even Marvel was at that time (and how Marvel DC was), it really wasn’t a surprise that the public very quickly decided that having an extra helping of trite superheroics in their comics was a bit like having an extra helping of vomit in their ice cream.

 

So, the Atlas line went away, and in time it gained the same rosy glow that nostalgia gives to many other slightly sub-par but time-lost things, like Aztec Bars, or Little and Large, or rickets. Grown men waxed lyrical about the merits of Thrilling Adventure Stories and The Destructor, forgetting that these were just two more me-too products at a time when the originals they were aping weren’t exactly breaking new ground either.

For some reason though – probably the fact that those who’d enjoyed the original Atlas line were now well into middle age and therefore getting misty-eyed about everything that, through virtue of not being alive, hadn’t got as paunchy and balding as they had – those old comics started popping up all over the place in the last few years.

The original Grim Ghost
 also had a sideline
modelling knitware

I think the first real blip on the modern radar was an issue of Comic Book Artist that led on the Atlas line. I’ll be honest, I’m not over-fond of CBA. It does a good enough job of dragging up the past and it does spotlight some creators who may not get the due they’re due these days, but on the whole I find it rather superficial and fanboyish in its uncritical yowzering over any old dross that happens to have hit print thirty years ago. Also, its editor’s habit of referring to himself as ‘Ye Ed’ gets right on my tits.

The Atlas issue of CBA wasn’t entirely bad despite its desperate need to remain inoffensive. It featured some quite decent pieces of art which were only improved from being in black and white rather than having garish 70s colours slapped all over them, and it carried a history of the company that revealed what it was really like to work for a comics publisher back then, a history that was only improved by the contributors’ knowledge that as the company was no longer extant they wouldn’t be burning any freelancer bridges by telling the world the unvarnished truth about what went on.

The original Phoenix had
 absolutely no problem with
wearing a light blue jockstrap

Since then, whenever I’ve spent a decent length of time in a comicbook store – by which I mean time measured in weeks rather than hours, time spent actually being a small businessman, which is what I occasionally do when called to do so – I’ve noticed that when copies of Atlas titles turn up, they pretty soon go out again. There’s a demand for them; not a huge one, but it's there. It’s the old ‘buying your youth back’ thing that men (and women) of a certain age do. Atlas comics are bought in the same way that CD reissues of dreadful old prog rock albums are; nobody actively wants to hear an Amon Duul album but owning a copy to replace the one lost in the divorce, or scratched to buggery by inquisitive toddlers, turns the clock back and makes the razorcut pain of impending mortality just a little duller.

It’s inevitable then that somebody should have revived the Atlas characters. It’s also inevitable that one of the resurrection men picking over this particular body should be Richard Emms, and it’s so bloody inevitable you could set your watch by it that Richard should shove copies of the first three new Atlas books into my hands at the last London Comic Mart and say “Here you go Shippy, write a review of those.” 

And that's precisely what I'm going to do.

Next time.