Adam Graham's Blog: Christians and Superheroes - Posts Tagged "action-heroes"

The Action Heroes Archives, Vol. 1 by Joe Gill

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is one of two books that takes a look at the late Charlton Comics action heroes. This one focuses on the character of Captain Atom, who was originally written by Joe Gill and drawn (almost exclusively) by Spider-man creator Steve Ditko. This book collects Captain Atom stories from Issues 33-42 of Space Adventures and then after Ditko left Marvel he became artist for Captain Atom's comic and the first five issues of that run are included.

Captain Atom was an Air Force captain who obtained amazing atomic power after being in a space accident.

The first section of the book contains very short stories of five-to-seven pages while the Captain Atom stories were book length adventures.

The shorts ranged from too quick to just plain pointless. There was at least one attempt to have a continuing plot around a powerful Venusian woman that was never followed up, but mostly the stories lacked continuity. The full length adventures were actually pretty fun featuring some solid villains such as Dr. Spectro.

The big highlight of the book is the art. Indeed, the Ditko art is the only thing that really kept me going during the shorts. It's definitely very fun and he shows a ton of talent that carries the book. The full-length stories were good and different. They had neither the emotional depth of the Marvel comics of the era or the sillyness of the DC comics, giving the book a kind of old school science fiction feel which is actually appealing in its own right.

Ultimately, the Ditko art throughout plus the very nicely written full-length stories at the end, and the Cold War action at the beginning made this an enjoyable read for me.



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