Six-Million-Dollar Man #1 - Charlton

This is from the seventies--no duh, right? 1976, to be exact, and was one of the low-ambitioned comic-company Charlton Publication's meager efforts to do a line of black-and-white magazines.

Behind a dynamite Neal Adams cover (and let's face it, if you were a B&W magazine editor in the 1970's, you pretty much had to hire Neal Adams to do your cover) is...three pages of ads and a table of contents. Good start, Charlton, real good start--way to draw your audience in.

After a text article on Lee Majors, finally we get to the first story, "The Cyborg is Born!" There are no specific art credits, but the TOC lists Neal Adams, Terry Austin, Steve Austin (oh, you wacky guys!), Joe Barney, Joe Brozowski, Rick Bryant, Karin Daugherty, Dick Giordano, Klaus Janson, Bruce Patterson, Carl Potts, Mark Rice, and (*whew*!) Josef Rubinstein, with story by Joe Gill (writer of approximately 42,000 Charlton comic scripts). I can't quite tell who did what on this story, though I do detect traces of Neal Adams layouts, and some Giordano and Austin inking.

The next story is "An Eye For Details!", a text piece on Lindsay Wagner, another story called "The Deadly Raven", where Steve Austin takes on some sort of emaciated, long-lost Nazi-type named Colonel Shek. Then another text article about Richard Anderson (I think Charlton was blowing their text-article-wad all in this first issue), and then another story called "Escape from Shark Island" which features the greatest comic-book sound effect of all time:


Yes, gunt.

Charlton, being a publisher of all kinds of periodicals, fills the few remaining pages with an ad for some of their other magazines, like Official Karate, Real West, Nashville Sound, and Reel Soul (with JJ Walker on the cover!). Finally, we've got just one more text article, "Your Day on the Set of 'The Six Million Dollar Man'", which includes a trip to the Universal commissary. Mmm...tater-tots!

Altogether, Charlton's magazines were like their comics--kinda all over the place, mostly dull, with an occasional moment of excitement escaping the black hole of mediocrity. One of the more unusual aspects is on the next-to-last page, which contains a series of quarter-and-half-page ads for products. One of these is a 8mm Motion-Picture projector, which is, according to the ad copy, "a new thrilling sensation" and "makes people look so full and real, you'll feel you can reach out and touch them" (emphasis mine). To get this across, the ad features a drawing of a beautiful, curvy woman wearing very filmsy clothing. So flimsy, that you can see right through to her breasts, nipples and crotch area, all helpfully drawn in. Think I'm kidding? Buy it and look for yourself! Geez, did Jim Warren guest-edit this issue?