Random Reads: The Brute #1

Greetings, Groove-ophiles! Here's another of the short-lived Atlas/Seaboard's attempts to rip off another Marvel character. This one's pretty obvious: The Brute=The Hulk. The Brute is a hulking giant who is angry at the world; instead of being created by gamma rays, he's released from being frozen in ice (a la Captain America) by nuclear radiation. He has blue skin instead of green skin (I s'pose from being in ice all those centuries), and he's a whole lot more vicious than Marvel's mass of manic muscle. In fact, that's the thing that really sets The Brute apart from The Hulk; by the end of the first issue, he'd killed four people. It should come as no surprise that this much darker and edgier Hulk knock-off was written by Michael Fleisher, best known for his work with Jim Aparo on the epitome of mid-70s dark and edgy, The Spectre. The art by Silver Age great Mike Sekowsky is inked by Pablo Marcos--an unlikely but quite appropriate combination. When most folks think or hear about The Brute, they usually think about the--eh--suggestive tail numbers on the airplane featured on its last page, but that's doing this mag a huge disservice. Fleisher, Sekowsky, and Marcos crafted a very well done comic. From November 1974, under a far-out Dick Giordano cover lurks... "Night of the Brute!"