Movie Monsters #4 - Atlas

Atlas, in its attempt to copy every successful idea from other comics companies, left no stone unturned. One fine example of that is Movie Monsters, Atlas' lookalike to the groundbreaking Famous Monsters of Filmland.

These magazines never did much for me as a kid--even FMOF--so I don't have that sense of wonderful nostalgia for these like a lot of others have, but I wanted to see for myself what Atlas' version looked like. I went after this issue, #4, because, among the Atlas staffers themselves, this is an infamous issue.

I say infamous because it was one of the last publications prepared in the offices before Atlas was closed down, and that whole one-foot-out-the-door feeling of people looking for other work pervades this issue.

Amid the articles on Star Trek, Disney films, The Loch Ness Monster, Lon Chaney jr., The Thing, Flash Gordon, and Ray Harryhausen films, there are spelling mistakes, factual errors, and odd sentences. Most egregiously is a page in the Loch Ness Monster article, where two boxes where graphics were supposed to be are blank. I can picture the proofs for this issue, sitting on someone's desk, collecting dust.

To be fair, from what I've read about the inner workings of Atlas(mostly the superb history done in Comic Book Artist #16), the staffers like Jeff Rovin and Steve Mitchell were trying their best, but owners/publishers Martin Goodman and his, uh, less interested son Chip kept undercutting them, slashing budgets and micromanaging at random times. It must have made working at Atlas a harrowing experience(indeed, Mitchell tells a story in CBA about being so stressed one day he went into the bathroom and cut off all his hair--and this was the seventies!), so the fact that some cheesy monster mag went out with some mistakes is hardly a Crime Against Humanity.

This issue stands as more of an example of what can be produced when not all of a company's oars are going in the same direction.