Atlas-Seaboard Month-By-Month - October 1975

We have reached the end. Atlas-Seaboard, a fledgling company with veteran publishers, veteran talent, and at least early on a hefty pocketbook, made a big impact in 1975. They offered all kinds of titles in all kinds of genres, but by the end of the year they would be gone. There is only one book with an October date.


PHOENIX THE PROTECTOR #4 is an ironic choice as Atlas-Seaboard's final publication. The final Phoenix story is another attempt to revise the original, and it's not a very good effort really. The artwork by Ric Estrada and Frank Giacoia is perfectly okay, but lacked the edgy spontaneity of the Sal Amendola work that had graced the first three issues. The story by Gary Friedrich offers our hero in a fit of despair attempting to kill himself by flying into the air and overloading his spacesuit. Before his desperate plan can work, aliens (not the Deiei, other aliens) known as The Protectors beam him aboard their spaceship and his wounds are attended to by a gaggle of lovely space-chicks. His wounds bandage and his face transformed, he confronted by a tribunal of overly-dressed aliens (all more or less humanoid, though the script at times seems to suggest otherwise) who inform Ed Tyler the Deiei worked for them, and now that they have failed the Earth problem has defaulted to them. (For the record there are two short scenes that tie up apparent loose ends from the previous plot line, but it's not clear if we're supposed to see Ed's wife and boss again.) Our hero has been chosen it seems to salvage the Earth's behind by doing his hero thing, and to help him they outfit him with new gimmicks and a new outfit. After his new gear is on, but before he's had a chance to test-drive it, he's beamed to a battleground of some sort where he confronts a cyclops. After a slow start, he eventually beats his opponent and proceeds to take on this new task as savior. The final panel shows our hero, renamed the Protector, staring out toward the reader, his face in calm repose, accepting of his fate.

And that's it.


The Atlas-Seaboard company disappears into the comics mist alongside Fawcett, Fox, Tower, Centaur, Skywald and so many others. The company was an oddball blend of hubris, experience, and striking naivete. I remember wanting more than anything for them to succeed, but by the end I was ready for it to be over. The promise was wasted, and the books had drifted far from their original concepts. Thanks to those who have followed me down this particular memory lane.

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