Atlas Comics - Morlock #3.

Life's never easy when you're half-man half-salad, and issue #3 of Atlas Comics' Morlock seems determined to prove it beyond all doubt.

When it begins, we find Morlock still roaming the countryside and - having killed virtually everyone he's ever met - still bemoaning his fate.

He's on his way to see a scientist called Whitlock who he believes can help him with his random homicidal tendencies.

How he knows about this Whitlock, we're never told. How he finds him, we're never told.

Unfortunately, Morlock's not the only one to find him because the dreaded thought police have also located the scientist and, when Morlock gets there, he finds them setting fire to the man.

Morlock of course reacts as any of us would. He turns into a killer tree and eats the thought police's leader.

Fortunately, despite having been set on fire, Whitlock doesn't die.

Instead, when Morlock's returned to normal, the scientist befriends him and shows him his underground base from which he's all set to lead his followers in a somewhat ad hock revolution that mostly involves him putting on a mask and declaring it's a revolution.

Unfortunately for that revolution, within minutes, the thought police burst in and start killing everyone, just as Morlock once more turns into a killer tree.

So, Whitlock shoots Morlock dead and then, showing the never-say-die spirit any revolutionary needs, prepares to blow up himself, his base and all his followers.

You have to give it to Atlas, there's not many comics companies that'd think of killing a strip's star in the third issue.

But then again, did they really intend to leave him dead? It should be pointed out that Morlock's a plant not a person and so there's no guarantee a bullet would kill him like it would the rest of us. And it's a safe bet they weren't really going to have Whitlock blow up himself and all his followers, or there wouldn't have been an awful lot left to write about in the next issue.

Apart from the seeming death of Morlock, the comic's main point of interest is of course that its art's by Steve Ditko and Berni Wrightson which isn't quite as exciting a combo as it sounds, as, a bit of extra visual depth aside, it looks pretty much like Steve Ditko always looks.

On the writing front, Michael Fleisher's no longer on board, which means no females get eaten. But anyone fearing a shortage of cannibalism and humourless bloodshed need fear not, as his replacement Gary Friedrich serves up more of the same, with Morlock having a remarkable knack of blundering into the people he needs to blunder into for the story to happen, and showing no personality beyond complaining about his fate.

Strangely, at no point are we told why Whitlock survived being set on fire, and it doesn't seem we're even expected to be curious about it.

I said, when I reviewed issue #1, that Morlock was one of the few Atlas strips that had potential. And it had.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mean Morlock himself had the potential to be a great super-hero. With his tendency to kill everyone he encounters, he clearly didn't, but the basic set-up of an inhuman man on the loose in a dystopian world did at least have the potential to create interesting stories.

Sadly, it never lasted long enough, nor seemed ambitious enough to give us them. Who knows what magic the likes of Don McGregor and Craig Russell could have conjured up if handed the same concept?

Still, with the introduction of the Midnight Men, there're clear signs Atlas were at least trying to expand the narrative and take the strip into whole new directions.

Sadly though, there were to be no more issues for Morlock; and we're doomed to never know just what fate would have had in store for the titular terror and ourselves.

Atlas Comics' Morlock 2001 #2.

In my last post, I bravely made the claim that Morlock 2001, with its pea-pod born protagonist, was one of the few Atlas Comics titles that had the potential to generate interesting stories.

Today I'm going to put that claim to the test by reading issue #2 and seeing just what magic Michael "The Spectre" Fleisher can weave from his homicidal herbman.

We start with Morlock on the run from the police. This leads him to flee on a train but, with the sort of luck only he could have, on board, he encounters the cast of A Clockwork Orange and promptly kills them.

After getting off the train, he then encounters The Heap - two of him.

The Heaps are threatening a blind girl, causing Morlock to leap to her defence. It turns out the Heaps have been created by her father, a scientist out to create a race of plant men to help humanity.

At first it looks like the three of them are going to get on famously but the scientist gets wind of the fact there's a reward out for Morlock's arrest and promptly locks him in a shed.

Sadly, that scientist hasn't counted on the daring of his blind daughter who frees Morlock - only for him to turn into a tree and eat her.

I'm starting to spot a certain pattern to Morlock. He meets someone unpleasant and kills them by touching them. He then encounters a girl, befriends her then eats her. There's probably some sort of metaphor for life in there though I'm struggling to spot what it is.

But it's a bizarre tale, mostly for Fleisher's bafflingly shameless pilfering of other people's ideas. We don't just get the aforementioned swipes, we even get a cop show up who's clearly Kojak.

As with issue #1, we finish with Morlock wandering off into the distance, wondering what'll become of him.

There is a progression though. At the end of last issue, he'd just found the potion that can keep him human. At the end of this one, he's lost it, meaning there's nothing to stop him transforming from now on.

And so, as our sort-of-hero disappears into the sunset, we hear the Bill Bixby Hulk play-out music in our heads and can only ponder just what further vicissitudes issue #3 can throw at him and at all those he encounters.

Atlas Comics' Morlock 2001 #1.

As I roam the dense forests of Tinsley, people often say to me, "Steve. The trees. Look at all those trees. Who's your favourite super-hero who can turn into a man-eating tree?"

Well, there's a lot of competition for that title but, after much thought on the matter, I can only go for Atlas Comics' very own plant man Morlock.

I am tempted to call him Adam Morlock but I'm sure the fact that both he and the similarly named Marvel character were born from pods is pure coincidence.

Sadly, like all Atlas characters, Morlock's run was to prove short-lived but it was certainly hard to forget.

In a future dictatorship, a scientist's gunned down for owning books and doing forbidden plant experiments.

The authorities who killed him soon discover he'd been working on creating a man who's part human, part vegetable. Upon his emergence from his giant pea pod, they name this man Morlock and, upon discovering he can turn people to plants just by touching them, use him as their enforcer.

Well, Morlock might be a plant but he's no stooge and he soon rebels against his corrupt paymasters - but not before discovering that, when he gets a mad, he turns into a man-eating tree.

I wouldn't want to cast aspersions on writer Michael ("The Spectre") Fleisher but, what with The Brute and The Tarantula, this is at least the third cannibal super-hero I can think of that he contributed to the Atlas cause. Some might start to find this worrying.

It also has to be said you can spot from a mile away where all his ideas are stolen from. There's a touch of Warlock to it, a touch of The Time Machine, a touch of the Hulk, a touch of 1984, a touch of Fahrenheit 451, a touch of Frankenstein - and probably a whole bunch of other things I've missed out.

Concerns about cannibalism and plagiarism aside, the thing actually works, mostly because there's a strong visceral appeal to the strip.

That's not to say Fleisher's story-telling here's any more than rudimentary but it's a great concept in that it allows artist Al Milgrom to let loose with the imagery. It's hard to comment on the quality of his draftsmanship, because he's inked by Jack Abel who, to my eyes at least, makes every artist look like Jack Abel. If I was a big fan of Abel's inking style, that wouldn't be a problem but he was always one of my least favourite inkers.

Regardless of that, Milgrom serves up some wonderfully nightmarish images and composition in the tale, the chief ones being the transformation of a government lackey into topiary, and Morlock's murder of the female agent who'd been manipulating him.

It might seem unlikely, given how obvious its roots are but, on the strength of issue #1 at least, Morlock was one of the few Atlas strips that actually had potential to work.