Archie Goodwin got fed up with Stan Lee's showboating at Marvel and left them for the Bronze Age company made up of former Marvel artists, Atlas/Seaboard Publishing. The comics writer created what was one of their more successful titles lasting a full four issues, The Destructor, where most Atlas titles barely lasted three. Goodwin teamed up with original Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko and the legendary Wally Wood to make Destructor, a street-level hero similar to Daredevil but with a multitude of enhanced abilities. Possibly ripping off the name from Marvel's Golden Age hero, The Destroyer, Destructor is one of the first heroes based out of New Jersey instead of New York. Jay Hunter works for Max Raven's mafia who accidently sees them putting out a hit on someone. Not wanting any witnesses, a mob gunman follows Jay to his father Simon's laboratory where the idealistic scientist was working on his on knockoff of the Captain America formula. Simon wants to make Jay his guinea pig to test the formula on, but his son laughs it off stating that superpowers are lame, just as the gunman enters to shoot them both. Simon manages to get some of the formula into Jay before he dies, and Jay hides out from the mob at his dad's lab since he figures they wouldn't look there. Jay figures out pretty quick that he has super-strength and a sleek new superhero costume his old man had made for him. He calls himself The Destructor as he goes a revenge spree by sabotaging Raven's businesses. The mob boss gets pissed and hastily hires the masked supervillain Slaymaster to rub Destructor out. Destructor defeats Slaymaster and uses his own costume to infiltrate Raven's home, but his revenge is short lived as Raven's own goons gun their boss down in a bid for power. After his first issue, Destructor took on a bunch of Marvel copycats like a gender-swapped Kraven called Huntress, Baron Von Strucker's stunt double of Deathgrip, as well as a den of underground mutants similar to the X-Men's Morlocks. Atlas might have lasted longer if most readers didn't see them as a parody of superheroes instead of being legit comics. Archie Goodwin eventually went back to Marvel before The Destructor's last issue which Ditko still worked on for the duration of its run. The Destructor is in essence a backwards Spider-Man who doesn't care about responsibility, even after a nuclear accident give him even further superpowers like shooting lasers from his hands, but his secondary mutation done decades before the X-Men developed the concept didn't help keep Destructor's publisher from drowning in a whirlpool.
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