Proving once again that there is no piece of comic-book intellectual property so minor that somebody won’t bank on nostalgia for it, Ardden Entertainment has announced that they’ll be relaunching the mid-’70s Atlas Comics line at this year’s New York Comic-Con.
The original Atlas/Seaboard didn’t last very long: it was launched in mid-1974 by Marvel Comics’ founder Martin Goodman, and collapsed in mid-1975. (For a fascinating history of the imprint, see Jon B. Cooke’s article “Vengeance, Incorporated.”) It was essentially formed to compete directly with Marvel Comics, and managed to poach a handful of Marvel creators by offering the highest page rates comics had ever seen and ownership rights to creators of characters. A couple of its titles were reasonably good, especially Howard Chaykin’s ’30s-era mercenary The Scorpion (a concept he returned to shortly thereafter with Dominic Fortune). But Atlas never quite caught on: no single title the company published lasted longer than four issues, some of them changed direction drastically after an issue or two, and many were blatant knock-offs of other titles (Vicki, for instance, was slightly altered reprints of a ’60s era faux-Archie series, Tippy Teen).
The first two revived Atlas projects announced by Ardden are Phoenix (a science-fiction series, created by Jeff Rovin and Sal Amendola, which became a much more conventional superhero title, Phoenix… The Protector, with its fourth and final issue) and The Grim Ghost (a Michael Fleisher/Ernie Colon supernatural superhero project that lasted three issues). There’s no word yet on what involvement, if any, their original creators will have with the new versions.