#‘That Evil Scorpion Dude From Treasure Planet’
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So weird question: Not long ago you posted a few panels from a comic where a guy says “You’ve got an ugly pug there, pal... I think I’ll rearrange it!” And shoots a dude in the face. What comic was that? I saw that comic in Texas when I was like 9 or 10 and I’ve remembered that DIRTY HARRY-ish sequence for decades....
I had to work till late tonight, and I’m fried. But that would be Targitt, also known as “John Targitt… Man-Stalker.” (Cue: “your mum” joke). You can find the first issue here– the sequence is from there (I also like this double-page spread of a plane exploding, killing the Man-Stalker’s wife and kid, while an evil hippie watches and giggles, and I like the last page, when it’s trying to be Point Blank). I suspect that I got that image from Steve Does Comics, though.
I got interested briefly in Atlas-Seaboard comics. They were Martin Goodman’s sleazier answer to Marvel, after he was out at Marvel. There’s a long story floating around out there about how they were badly mis-run, from one of the editors– over-production, Goodman trying to imitate Marvel and being from a more rip-off-y era of comics, barely treading water until they piss off DC who basically mercy kill them (that was the impression I got though my memory’s already blurry), etc.
(If you want to read stories about comics, it’s not as good as the weirdo old “Marvel murdered Gene Day!” rumors, though. Which obviously I don’t think are true; Sean Howe barely spends a paragraph on them in his book and you can feel his embarrassment in mentioning it just radiate off the page– but there’s more entertaining shit out there on that topic then there really is about this entire publishing line. Dave Sim essays, and absurd Jim Shooter blog posts that are like “I did not kill Gene Day!!” That’s some awkward weird shit. I found those stories all around the same time, a month or two ago, so they’re all linked in my head…).
But the sleaziness of the comics has an appeal for me– or I don’t know if sleaziness is the right word, but the 1970′s had the best lowest-common-denominator. Comics like Lomax NYPD Police Action, The Destructor (Born of Fury! Sworn to Vengeance!, by a powerhouse team of Archie Goodwin, Steve Ditko and Wally Wood on inks, until Ditko apparently walked away angry over how he was getting lettered or some shit), Planet of the Vampires (which looks pretty woke), etc.
That quality of… like, the dialogue on the cover of Police Action #2 (”First I off you– then the chick!” “Wrong! Your kill spree is over, punk! You’re finished!”). Aaah, what dreams are made of. None of it rises to the level of a Hookjaw or Pat Mills’s Invasion! But that aesthetic… older comics are just so much more desperate to entertain, but with such a lower opinion of the reader… and correctly! I am definitely the lowest common denominator, so… Atlas-Seaboard feels like comics designed to be found accidentally in back issue bins, and treasured by the kind of person compelled to trawl through those. More than it feels like it was designed for like actual readers…
The one of those comics time’s remembered is probably Chaykin’s Scorpion, The one time should remember is this Archie Goodwin/Walt Simonson comic I mentioned before– that one’s a real enough comic– supposedly Simonson drew a really A+ Godzilla/Rodan-y comic for them, too but it “disappeared” when things went belly-up before it could get published. I don’t know. Simonson 4ever.
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