The Atomic Knights

As a child I dreamed of becoming a comic book illustrator. My biggest influence came from an all-purpose artist named Murphy Anderson , a DC Comics stalwart during the 1960s, whose precision style inspired me to draw and sketch as diligently as I could and as often as I could. Almost fifty years later Murphy Anderson is still one of my favorite comic book artists.

Known primarily as "everyone's inker" in the comic book industry, Anderson was also a forthright penciller and a master draftsman. His long-standing efforts and multifaceted skills have earned him numerous accolades in the field, including several Alley Award's for Best Inker and Best Novel, and inductions into both the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1999.

Anderson started his career immediately after graduating from high school in 1943, landing a job in New York as a staff artist for Fiction House. Hired primarily to be an interior artist for their pulp magazine lineup, he also worked on several of their science fiction comic books, including Star Pirate and Buck Rogers. In 1948 he took over art chores on the syndicated Buck Rogers comic strip, a dream come true for him at the time.

In the 1950s he started drawing full time for DC National Comics. One of his early collaborators was Jerry Siegel, the co-creator of Superman. Later in his career he would team up with Curt Swan, another Hall of Fame artist that was universally recognized by fans as being Superman's most influential illustrator.

During Anderson's long stint at DC Comics, editor Julius Schwartz was instrumental in getting the most out of his talents, assigning him inking duty on nearly all of the pencil work submitted by other staff artists. As a result, Anderson participated in creating the modernized look of several major superhero characters, from Adam Strange and Superman, to The Flash, The Spectre and even Batman. Eventually, after much soliciting, Schwartz allowed him full pencil-and-ink reign on several series, including The Atomic Knights, Hawkman and Showcase. In addition to those achievements he also provided illustrations for House of Mystery, Tales of the Unexpected, Mystery in Space, and Strange Adventures, which included the Atomic Knight stories and many other science fiction tales penned by writers John Broome, France Herron and Gardner Fox. Murphy Anderson's firm grasp of science fictional tropes and crisp detailed drawing style made him one of the best artists during the Silver Age of comics, and extended him far into the eighties and beyond.

In celebration of his DC tenure, the entire run of The Atomic Knights has been published in a brand new hardcover edition, complete with dustjacket and illustrated boards. The book contains all fifteen of the Silver Age Atomic Knight stories drawn exclusively by Murphy Anderson and written by John Broome. These exciting science fiction tales were first published as backup stories in DC's Strange Adventures, beginning in June 1960, and ending in January 1964.

As conceived by DC house writer Broome, the Atomic Knights are founded after The Great Twenty-Day Hydrogen War of 1986, which devastated the entire planet Earth. In the war's aftermath, military man Gardner Grayle has a chance meeting with another survivor, a school teacher named Douglas Herald. The two men quickly discover some unique irradiated suits of medieval armor that have remarkable abilities to safeguard wearers against various futuristic threats. At large in this adverse new world are monsters, megalomaniacs, and tons of deadly radiation. To combat these omnipresent dangers, our two heroes enlist the aid of four other good citizens; Herald's beautiful sister Marene, the stalwart twins Wayne and Hollis Hobard, and Bryndon, one of Earth's last remaining scientists. Thus is born the Atomic Knights, a chivalrous organization whose sole purpose will be to assist and protect other less fortunate survivors. As expected in this imaginative setting, many dangerous adventures unfold as our intrepid heroes push forward across a devastated American landscape, helping citizens rebuild lives along the way, and wearing their special armor suits as warranted.

During the sixties this type of grim adventure story attracted only science fiction and comic book fans. Now, post-apocalyptic themes are readily accepted by mainstream audiences, with bestselling novels like Stephen King's The Stand, Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Justin Cronin's The Passage providing additional clout. The Atomic Knights were the first stories in this genre to be adapted to comic book format, followed closely by Gold Key's Mighty Samson (soon to have its own reprint edition).

Murphy Anderson's illustrations for The Atomic Knights are, in my opinion, some of the best work he did in his long and productive career. Anderson was clearly inspired by the atmospheric setting provided by capable writer John Broome, and panels like the one pictured below from The Lost City of Los Angeles, show him at his compositional and imaginative best.

As a child, I would pour over Anderson's drawings for hours at a time, sometimes getting out paper and pencil and trying to imitate what I saw on the pages. Of course, my attempts never looked quite like his, but it's not for lack of trying. Even today I occasionally sketch some of his panels for fun, after all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Pictured below is a panel from The Cavemen of New York (one of my favorite stories from The Atomic Knights series), demonstrating Murphy Anderson's exacting precision with ink, detailed lines and signature faces. One interesting aspect of this story, and one that seized my psyche even as a child, was how the Atomic Knights leader uses a closed circuit television to deliver an impassioned speech aimed at the cavemen. In 1960, television's use as an influencial social instrument was as just effective then as it is today.

When Hawkman was given his own series book in 1964, DC editor Julius Schwartz gave Anderson the assignment. As expected, the consumate professional delivered even more outstanding work for that series until declining sales forced a merger with the Atom in 1968. Anderson continued on for seven more issues as an inker for the Atom/Hawkman series, teaming up with legendary penciller Joe Kubert and Hawkman's original writer Gardner Fox. That highly collectible, short-lived series remains memorable for it's overall artistry.

Because of Anderson's clout, and the fact that he preferred working with smaller illustrations (it made the inking process go much faster), he became credited for for instituting a system wide change in the size of an artists drawing sheet, reducing the standardized 13"x18" to a much smaller 10"x15" format, which lowered production costs overall, benefitting the industry as a whole. Fans with limited resources benefitted too, as comic book prices stayed consistently low for more than a decade. This significant revamping happened during Anderson's Hawkman run, and was yet another aspect of his ongoing contribution to Comics History.

Pictured at right is the cover of Hawkman #4 (Nov 1964), drawn entirely by Anderson, proving he was also very adept at creating bold covers with unique perspectives. A few years ago DC Comics republished the entire run of Hawkman in both black and white versions (Showcase Presents volumes 1 & 2), and color versions (Hawkman Archives volumes 1 & 2). Both formats are equally effective at highlighting the remarkable talents of Murphy Anderson (and his many collaborators).

I really appreciate the opportunity fans now have to own Silver Age comic books in such convenient modern formats. It's been a publishing trend for a decade or more by both Marvel and DC Comics. Dark Horse Publishing has also been busy assembling Silver Age collections from Dell, Gold Key, and Jim Warren original source material. For many of us baby-boomers who no longer have extensive comic book collections, or can't afford to start collecting the originals again, these archive editions provide a relatively affordable way to rediscover the joy of comic books that we had when we were young.

My only complaint about this new Atomic Knights hardcover edition is with the editors choice for font, illustration and design on the dustjacket. Utilizing the splash-page from The Menace of the Water-Raider is by itself okay (it certainly screams sci-fi), but tweaking the color and cropping the image seems a shame, as does changing the title font to block-styled lettering, which is dramatically different from the original titling in the stories. These days there's just too much revisionism and reshaping applied to the memories and objects from our past. Please keep those reproductions of historic artifacts as pure as possible I say!

What I do admire in this new DC collection is the newsprint type paper used for the interior pages, a real throwback to the classic comics of the past. If it wasn't for the feel of the glossy boards that frame the book, I would swear I was still reading one of my original 12¢ Strange Adventures. One thing's for sure, I love reading those classic comic books and will continue to do so in any format that's made available to us.