Number 1570: Sea Devils — the devil’s in the details

Despite dropping almost all my DC Comics purchases in '61-'62 after Marvel introduced The Fantastic Four and the rest of their early hero lineup (a fickle fan, wasn’t I?), an exception was DC’s Sea Devils. I bought it because of Russ Heath’s artwork. It’s telling that I stopped buying the book after issue #10 when other artists took over. It wasn’t that they were bad artists, just that I was buying the book because of Heath.

Looking at #1 after 50+ years makes me wonder if I just looked at the artwork without reading the stories, because I don’t remember them. Like this first story from issue #1, about a movie with a robot Octopus Man who roams the ocean floor walking a huge octopus on a leash. Then a real Octopus Man shows up. Next to this The Fantastic Four seems almost non-fiction. But there is that Russ Heath artwork, and that makes up for the implausibilities and overall silliness of editor Robert Kanigher’s scripts.

From Sea Devils #1 (1961).