Atlas/Seaboard Comics

~ the last words ~

Martin Goodman published the comic that became Marvel in 1939, sold the company in 1968 and stayed on as publisher until 1972. The understanding, as he saw it, was that his son Charles would inherit an editorial job there. Marvel's new corporate owners removed Chip instead, and Goodman opened an office at 717 Fifth Avenue on 24 June 1974 to publish comics in direct competition with the company he had founded. Gary Friedrich, who wrote for him, disputed the revenge reading of it years later and said he thought Goodman simply did it to make money.

The company was Seaboard Periodicals and the comics carried the Atlas name, recycled from Goodman's own 1950s imprint. Jeff Rovin came over from Warren Publishing to edit the color line and Larry Lieber, who is Stan Lee's brother, ran the black-and-white magazines. Roy Thomas was offered an editorial post and said no. The first issues carried cover dates of early 1975, which put them on newsstands at the end of 1974.

Sales were poor from the start and distribution was worse, which for a newsstand publisher in 1975 was the whole game. Readers who picked the books up found something that looked like Marvel drawn by Marvel's people, because that is largely what it was. Goodman dissolved the line in the fourth quarter of 1975. Twenty three comic titles and five magazines exist, and the final issue carried a September 1975 cover date.

I came to this one backwards, through back-issue lists and collector arguments online maybe thirty years after the fact, which is the only way anyone my age from outside the United States encounters a newsstand line that lasted eighteen months. Nine years separate the last Atlas cover date from my birth.

~ the record ~

~ what goodman offered the artists ~

The terms are the reason this failure is still discussed. Atlas paid higher page rates than either Marvel or DC and returned original artwork to the artists who drew it. It also offered creators a stake in characters they invented, which in 1974 was rare enough to work as recruitment on its own, and Neal Adams, Steve Ditko, Howard Chaykin and Rich Buckler all took work there.

Marvel and DC treated original art as company property and characters as work for hire without argument. A publisher with no market share used better terms as its only competitive weapon, which tells you how little those terms were costing the two companies that refused them. The industry took roughly another twenty years to arrive at the same offer voluntarily.

~ eighteen months of first issues ~

What killed the books was editorial panic. When early sales came in soft, Goodman ordered titles retooled to look more like whatever was selling at Marvel, so characters were rebuilt between issues by different hands than the ones who created them. Chaykin's Scorpion, a pulp hero set in the 1930s, was dragged into the present day by issue three and stopped being the thing anybody had signed up to read.

The result is a publisher whose entire output is first and second issues. Ironjaw, The Brute, Morlock 2001, Planet of Vampires and about eighteen others exist as fragments of series with no endings, and the artwork is good enough that pages from them now sell at auction for real money.

~ the characters that came back ~

Because the creators kept their rights, some of these characters simply walked. Chaykin reworked the Scorpion into Dominic Fortune and took him to Marvel, and Buckler's Demon Hunter became the Marvel character Devil-Slayer. The creator-ownership clause that was supposed to attract talent to Atlas ended up exporting Atlas's ideas to the competitor it was built to fight.

Goodman's grandson Jason announced a revival with Ardden Entertainment around 2010, and SP Media Group took majority ownership of the properties in May 2019. Nothing from any of that has lasted longer than the original line did.

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