No, not those guys. (And if you listened to that song any further than the first scream, you're a bigger metal fan that I'll ever be.) No, I mean this guy:
The Destructor #2 (April 1975), cover art by Larry Lieber and Frank Giacoia
Whoa, that pretty much looks like every single Marvel Comics cover during the mid-seventies, doesn't it?
Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #11 (October 1977), cover art by Al Milgrom
Atlas may not have had as popular a character as Spider-Man, but they did have one thing Marvel didn't have anymore: Steve Ditko!
Splash page of The Destructor #1 (April 1975), script by Archie Goodwin, pencils by Steve Ditko, inks by Wally Wood
Yep! The creator of The Question, Hawk and Dove, and The Creeper; the co-creator of Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and Captain Atom, Steve Ditko turns his prodigious pencil towards 717 Fifth Avenue in 1975, co-creating with Archie Goodwin a hero "born of fury! Sworn to Vengeance! He is..." The Destructor, one of the very few Atlas mags to last past three issues. (i.e., it lasted four issues.) Destructor was a one-man felony-fightin' action hero determined to take down organized crime the old fashioned way...by throwing it into some boxes!
From The Destructor #1
Secretly Jay Hunter, Destructor gained his super powers when his scientist father...well, let's let Goodwin/Ditko tell us, okay?
From The Destructor #1
Get all that? Don't worry if you didn't. Here's another origin montage from later in the same issue.
From The Destructor #1
Okay, just in case you haven't been paying attention, let's go over that one more time:
Panels from The Destructor #2 (April 1975), script by Archie Goodwin, pencils by Steve Ditko, inks by Wally Wood
Atlas/Seaboard notoriously attempted to capture the zeitgeist of Marvel Comics by creating similar-looking comics. Perhaps, in some cases, a little too closely. By now you may have spotted Destructor's vague resemblance to a certain web-slinging guy over at the House of Ideas:
From The Destructor #1
I'm pokin' fun here, but I love the art in The Destructor, especially the first two issues where Ditko was inked by Wally Wood. But there wasn't a lot tremendously innovative here: from the slim, swinging, leaping hero to his guilt-filled death of a loved one origin, Destructor was bidding for slices of those cool, crisp, Spider-Man dollars. In the following year, Marvel itself would figure out the best way to get more Spider-Man dollars with the premier of Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, but until then Atlas seems to have been hoping you'd grab Destructor. Even Ditko's artwork and some solid scripts by Archie Goodwin couldn't save the series from cancellation with ish #4. But in the meantime, swell Stevarino art, lots of broken furniture, and the debut of The Atlas/Seaboard Universe's version of J. Jonah Jameson:
From The Destructor #1
Some fairly lame villains didn't help matters, I'm afraid. Umm...did Steve realize exactly what it looks like he's drawing here? Um, not that I know anything about that.
Panels from The Destructor #4 (August 1975), script by Gerry Conway, pencils by Steve Ditko, inks by Al Milgrom, letters by John Duffy
Still, hoods were tossed, beams were swung from, and chairs were broken, and eventually The Destructor could sit back, relax, and eat a healthy dinner of a delicious bowl of hard-boiled eggs.
From The Destructor #1
The Destructor! He kinda looked like Spider-Man and he got his own dad shot in the chest, but every comic fan of the 1970s still remembers his haunting battle cry!:
From The Destructor #1
"One thing I do worry about is your distribution. Your other titles are impossible to find." Uh oh...that's a bad omen.
Letter column page from The Destructor #3 (June 1975)
Big names, grand plans, eventual collapse:
Text page from The Destructor #1
Make...Mine...Atlas!
House ad from The Cougar #2 (July 1975 )
Tomorrow: a planet where vampires evolved from men?
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2 comments:
And remember -- in the Atlas Universe, even the lice carry guns! Whoa!
Destructor's first two issues were better than concurrent Spider-Man. The next two took a turn toward the bizarre and gave him some stupid laser power he didn't need.
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