In addition to the avalanche of color comics, Atlas-Seaboard rolled out several B&W magazines during that hectic year of 1975. Tales of the Macabre and Devilina were straight up horror books in the tradition of Warren and later Marvel. Thrilling Adventure Stories was a bit different, a book featuring a range of stories as the title suggested of a more broadly adventurous nature. Tiger-Man debuted in TAS before getting his own color comic book. There are good stories by Frank Thorne, Jack Sparling, Jerry Grandenetti, and even a wonderful story by the Manhunter team of Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson.
The covers for the Atlas-Seaboard comic magazines were a pretty scattershot affair. There is the superb Jeff Jones piece for the debut of Tales of the Macabre followed by a solid Boris effort on issue two, in that early part of his career when his textures were still interesting.
Devilina sported a debut cover by some guy named Pujolar which had later did service as a Vampirella cover some years later (an ironic switch for sure) and then for the second issue a George Torjussen effort that really tore up the expectations. That cover is sexy and weird at the same time. Torjussen has expressed a low regard for this cover, but I think it's fabulous.
Ernie Colon's artwork on the first issue of Thrilling Adventure Stories was decent and necessarily muddled, but Neal Adams really showed up strong on the second issue. There sure is no effort to affect a house style with these covers. I had to gather these up years later, as the magazines slipped by me during the summer of 1975 originally. They are worth the effort.
I gathered these Atlas-Seaboard gems up many years ago. As Famous Monsters of Filmland knockoffs go, these are really good ones. The first issue bears a December date and might well be the first Atlas-Seaboard publication, though that's suspect.
Greg Theakston, he of Pure Imagination Publishing fame and creator of the process of "Theakstonization" for cleaning up smudge and dirty comic pages, turns in two really evocative images for issues one and two. I especially like the Cyclops, the misbegotten but very memorable monster from Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad epic.
George Torjussen though really knocks it out of the park with his two paintings, especially the final one featuring The Thing from Outer Space. That's a fantastic image, and Torjussen has related how he had to watch the movie on late night television to remember what The Thing looked like. He sure did though, giving us a real insight into the shadowing invader.
Above is Gothic Romances a one-time only magazine that hoped to add women to the Atlas-Seaboard reading audience, despite all the content appealing to boys and men they published otherwise. It features a fantastic painted cover by Elaine Duillo, artwork used again on a novel entitled The Conservatory written by Phyllis Hastings.
And that wraps up my year long look back at the summer of 1975, when a new kid showed up on the block, but who quickly got knocked down because of a combination of poor management and a weak economy. Though the Atlas-Seaboard material shows up in foreign formats sometimes, the rights to it still remain locked up as far as I know.
The stuff is still pretty cheap on the back issue market, save for a few gems like those above. But this material like the stuff from Tower Comics and Skywald Comics would make for some great reprints, and I suspect might well find an audience today.
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