A 50th ANNIVERSARY salute to Martin Goodman’s failed revenge play… By WALT GROGAN Fifty years ago this month, on June 24, 1974, Atlas/Seaboard opened its offices in New York City. If you’re unfamiliar with Atlas/Seaboard (aka Atlas Comics or simply Atlas), it was a short-lived, upstart company founded by former Marvel Comics publisher Martin Goodman as an apparent act of revenge after the company that bought the House of Ideas from him in 1968 reneged on a deal to keep his son Chip on. (It’s a matter of some dispute but widely believed to be the case.) Over its roughly one-year tenure, Atlas published 23 comics titles with only a few lasting to four issues, as well as five different magazines. Rather than start small, it flooded the market with titles subscribing to all genres popular at the time: superhero, monster, war, police, sci-fi, horror, Western, and teen comedy. With initial offerings of higher page rates, the company attracted both veteran and new creators, including Steve Ditko, Neal Adams, Wally Wood, Dick Giordano, Howard Chaykin, Ernie Colón, Jim Craig, Archie Goodwin, Rich Buckler, Gerry Conway, Michael Fleisher, Gaspar Saladino and Alex Toth, among others. The first comics titles were cover-dated January 1975. Larry Lieber and Jeff Rovin were the company’s editors. Sales, however, were sluggish and distribution proved difficult. Goodman became impatient and titles were yanked or reimagined to feature new or redesigned characters who sometimes only shared the name of their predecessor. Atlas’ final issue was cover-dated September 1975. The Atlas titles are still fairly easy and inexpensive to acquire today with only the Archie Comics knockoff, Vicki (itself a reprint of Tower Comics’ Tippy Teen), and the magazine Gothic Romance commanding high prices due to low print runs. The whole line is a fun read, however, even though many of the titles were pretty dark for the time, and I can imagine a few bumped up against the limits of the Comics Code Authority. While Atlas was one of the few Bronze Age companies to challenge the might of DC and Marvel in the realm of mainstream adventure comics, it paved the way for later companies like Neal Adams’ Continuity Comics, Dark Horse, and even Image to compete with the Big Two. Atlas made a brief return to the comics market in 2011 around the same time...