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Atlas Comics (1950s)

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Atlas Comics is the 1950s and early 1960s comic book publishing company that would evolve into Marvel Comics. Magazine and paperback-novel publisher Martin Goodman, whose business strategy involved having a multitude of corporate entities, used Atlas as the umbrella name for his comic-book division during this time. Atlas was located on the 14th floor of the Empire State Building.

This company is distinct from the 1970s comic-book company, also founded by Goodman, that is generally known as Atlas/Seaboard Comics.

After the Golden Age

Young Men #25: Cover art by Carl Burgos.

Atlas grew out of Timely Comics, the company Goodman founded in 1939 and whose star characters during the 1930s and '40s Golden Age of comic books were the Human Torch, the Sub-Mariner, and Captain America. The post-war era, however, found superheroes falling out of fashion. Television and paperback books now also competed for readers and leisure time.

The line marking the end of the Golden Age is vague, but for Timely, at least, it appears to have ended with the cancelation of Captain America Comics at issue #75 (Feb. 1950) — by which time the series had already been Captain America's Weird Tales for two issues, with the finale featuring merely anthological suspense stories and no superheroes. The company's flagship title, Marvel Mystery Comics, starring the Human Torch, had already ended its run (with #92, June 1949), as had Sub-Mariner Comics (with #32, the same month).

Goodman began using the globe logo of Atlas (see below), the newsstand-distribution company he owned, on comics cover-dated Nov. 1951. This united a line put out by the same publisher, staff and freelancers through 59 shell companies, from Animirth Comics to Zenith Publications.

Atlas would attempt to revive superheroes in Young Men #24-28 (Dec. 1953-June 1954), with the Human Torch (art by Syd Shores and Dick Ayers, variously), the Sub-Mariner (written and drawn by Bill Everett), and Captain America (writer Stan Lee, artist John Romita Sr.). Yet the featured the same sort of Communist Red Scare villains as the late-'40s comics and broke no new ground. DC Comics' Showcase #4 (Sept. 1956) would successfully bring back superheroes two years later and kick off the Silver Age of comic books, starting with a modern, uncluttered, streamlined reimagining of super-speedster The Flash.

Trend-following

The pre-Comics Code Astonishing #30 (Feb. 1954): Cover art by Joe Maneely.

Atlas, rather than similarly innovate, took what it saw as the proven route of following popular trends in TV and movies — Westerns and war dramas prevailing for a time, drive-in monsters another time — and even other comic books, particularly the EC horror line. Until Stan Lee, the editor-in-chief and head writer, would help revolutionize comic books with the advent of The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man in the early 1960s, Atlas was content to flood newsstands with profitable, cheaply produced product — often, despite itself, beautifully rendered by talented if low-paid young artists.

Goodman's "everything but the kitchen sink" approach resulted in a wider variety of genres than even Timely had published, emphasizing horror, Westerns, humor, crime and war comics, along with a helping of jungle books and romance titles, and even espionage, medieval adventure, Bible stories and sports. There were at least five staff writers besides Lee: Don Rico, Hank Chapman, Carl Wessler, Paul S. Newman, and, in the teen-humor division, future MAD Magazine cartoonist Al Jaffee.

The artists — some freelance, some on staff — included such veterans as Human Torch creator Carl Burgos, who did exquisite covers for the Young Men superhero-revival attempt, and Sub-Mariner creator Bill Everett. The next generation included the prolific and much-admired Joe Maneely, whose work in all genres but particularly Westerns and on the medieval adventure The Black Knight, produced an exquiste ouevre until his untimely death just prior to Marvel's 1960s breakthrough. The shadowy, voluptuous textures of Russ Heath's suspense tales, the languid fluidity of Gene Colan war stories, and the sharp, individualistic stylings of fledgling Steve Ditko's quirky bagatelles provided treasures amid the trash.

Humor and miscellanea

Sergeant Barney Barker #1, cover art by John Severin.

Atlas also published a plethora of children's and teen humor titles, including Dan DeCarlo's Homer, the Happy Ghost (a la Casper the Friendly Ghost) and Homer Hooper (a la Archie Andrews). If newspapers had Dennis the Menace, Atlas had Maneely's Melvin the Monster. John Severin, one of comics' top war artists, contributed the Sgt. Bilko-esque Sergeant Barkey Barker.

One of the most popular titles was the long-running Millie the Model, which began as a Timely Comics humor book in 1945 and ran a remarkable 207 issues, well into the Marvel-era '70s, launching spin-offs along the way. It became the proving ground for cartoonist DeCarlo — the future creator of Josie and the Pussycats, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and other Archie Comics characters, and the artist who established Archie's modern look. DeCarlo wrote and drew Millie for a remarkable ten years, even while such companion titles as Tillie the Typist, Nellie the Nurse and even his own Sherry the Showgirl fell by the wayside.

The high-school series Patsy Walker, which also debuted in 1945, ran 99 issues to Feb. 1962 and spun-off three titles. More naturalistic than the slapsticky Millie, it featured attractive but sedate art by Al Hartley, Al Jaffee, Morris Weiss and others . Given the tone and the target audience, Patsy Walker oddly included the legendary Harvey Kurtzman's bizarre "Hey Look!" one-pagers in several early issues. Patsy herself would be integrated into Marvel Universe continuity years later as the supernatural superheroine Hellcat.

No hellcats graced Atlas' funny animal books, but they did have Ed Winiarski's trouble-prone Buck Duck, Joe Maneely's mentally suspect Dippy Duck, and Howie Post's The Monkey and the Bear, which bore a striking resemblance to DC Comics' Fox and the Crow. Buck and others saw life again briefly in the early 1970s, when Marvel published the five-issue reprint title, Li'l Pals ("Fun-Filled Animal Antics!").

Notable miscellanea include the espionage title Yellow Claw, with sumptuous Joe Maneely, Jack Kirby and Severin art; the Native American hero Red Warrior, with art by Tom Gill; the Tom Corbett: Space Cadet-like Space Squadron, written and drawn by future Marvel production executive Sol Brodsky; and Sports Action, initially with true-life stories about the likes of George Gipp and Jackie Robinson, and later with fictional "Rugged Tales of Danger and Red-Hot Action!"

Atlas shrugs

From 1952 to late 1956, Goodman distributed this torrent of comics to newsstands through his self-owned distributor, Atlas. He then switched to another distributor that quickly went bankrupt. Stan Lee, in a 1988 interview , recalled that Goodman:

"...had gone with the American News Company. I remember saying to him, 'Gee, why did you do that? I thought that we had a good distribution company.' His answer was like, 'Oh, Stan, you wouldn't understand. It has to do with finance.' I didn't really give a damn, and I went back to doing the comics. e were left without a distributor and we couldn't go back to distributing our own books because the fact that Martin quit doing it and went with American News had gotten the wholesalers very angry ... and it would have been impossible for Martin to just say, 'Okay, we'll go back to where we were and distribute our books.' turning out 40, 50, 60 books a month, maybe more, and the only company we could get to distribute our books was our closest rival, National (DC) Comics. Suddenly we went ... to either eight or 12 books a month, which was all Independent News Distributors would accept from us."

For that and other reasons, including a small recession in the overall economy, Atlas retrenched. A fabled story has the publisher discovering a closet-full of unused, but paid-for, art, leading him to have virtually the entire staff fired while he used up the inventory. In the interview noted above, Lee, one of the few able to give a first-hand account, gave his perspective on the downsizinbg:

"It would never have happened just because he opened a closet door. But I think that I may have been in a little trouble when that happened. We had bought a lot of strips that I didn't think were really all that good, but I paid the artists and writers for them anyway, and I kinda hid them in the closet! And Martin found them and I think he wasn't too happy. If I wasn't satisfied with the work, I wasn't supposed to have paid, but I was never sure it was really the artist's or the writer's fault. But when the job was finished I didn't think that it was anything that I wanted to use. I felt that we could use it in inventory — put it out in other books. Martin, probably rightly so, was a little annoyed because it was his money I was spending."

Return of Jack Kirby

Strange Tales #79 (Dec. 1960): Cover art by Jack Kirby & Steve Ditko

Goodman's men's magazines and paperback books were still successful — the comics, except in the early Golden Age, were always a relatively small part of the business — and Goodman considered shutting the division down.

The specific details of his decision not to are murky. Jack Kirby, who after his amicable split with creative partner Joe Simon, had not been as budy as he would have liked during this time, recalled in a 1990 interview for The Comics Journal that in late 1958 or early 1959,

"I came in and they were moving out the furniture, they were taking desks out — and I needed the work! ... Stan Lee is sitting on a chair crying. He didn't know what to do, he's sitting on a chair crying — he was still just out of his adolescence." "I told him to stop crying. I says, 'Go in to Martin and tell him to stop moving the furniture out, and I'll see that the books make money.'"Template:Fn

Interviewer and Comics Journal publisher Gary Groth later wrote of this interview in general, "Some of Kirby's more extreme statements ... should be taken with a grain of salt...."Template:Fn. Lee, specifically asked about the office-closing anecdote, said :

"I never remember being there when people were moving out the furniture. If they ever moved the furniture, they did it during the weekend when everybody was home. Jack tended toward hyperbole, just like the time he was quoted as saying that he came in and I was crying and I said, "Please save the company!" I'm not a crier and I would never have said that. I was very happy that Jack was there and I loved working with him, but I never cried to him. (laughs)"

Whatever the specific circumstances, Atlas gave Kirby a high-profile market, splashing the maestro's work across countless covers and lead stories, while the singular quality and dynamism of Kirby's art elevated such preexisting comics as Strange Tales and the newly launched Amazing Adventures, Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish above the look-alike fare of other horror/science fiction titles that had proliferated in EC's wake. A Kirby monster story, ususally inked by Dick Ayers, would generally open each book, followed by one or two twist-ending thrillers or sci-fi tales drawn by Don Heck, Paul Reinman, or Joe Sinnott, with the whole thing capped by a often-surreal, sometimes self-reflexive Lee-Ditko short.

Atlas or Marvel?

File:Atlaslog.jpeg

The exact point at which "Atlas" became "Marvel" has never been definitively established. However, collectors routinely refer to the companies' comics from the April 1959 cover-dates onward (when they began featuring Jack Kirby artwork on his return to Goodman's company), as pre-superhero Marvel.

Goodman had begun moving away from newsstand distributor Kable News by branding his comics with the Atlas globe on issues cover-dated Nov. 1951, even though Kable's "K" logo and North American map symbol remained through the Aug. 1952 issues. Goodman shut down his self-distributorship on Nov. 1, 1956, and began newsstand distrbution through American News Service. The Atlas globe remained, however, through the Oct. 1957 issues, when American News went out of business. Goodman switched to the distributor Independent News, owned by rival DC Comics, and dropped the Atlas globe at that time. Had American News continued, Goodman might have continued to brand the company Atlas.

Atlas titles by genre

This list is incomplete and in progress

CRIME

  • Casey - Crime Photographer  #1-4 (Aug. 1949-Feb. 1950)

ESPIONAGE

FUNNY ANIMAL and other children's comics

  • Buck Duck  #1-4 (June-Dec. 1953)
  • Dippy Duck  #1 (Oct. 1957)
  • The Monkey and the Bear  #1-3 (Sept. 1953-Jan. 1954)
  • Wonder Duck  #1-3 (Sept. 1949-March 1950), continued as
  • It's a Duck's Life  #4-11 (Nov. 1950-Feb. 1952)
  • Homer, the Happy Ghost  #1-22 (March 1955 - Nov. 1958)
  • Melvin the Monster * #1-6 (July 1956 - July 1957), continued as
  • Dexter the Demon * #7 (Sept. 1967)
* Note: Not supernatural, but Dennis the Menance-inspired

HUMOR - SATIRE

  • Crazy
  • Riot
  • Wild

HUMOR - SITCOM

  • Patsy Walker  #1-99 (Winter 1945 - Marvel Comics)
  • Patsy and Hedy  #1-73 (Feb. 1952 -Dec. 1960)
  • Patsy and Her Pals  #1-29 (May 1953 - Aug. 1957)
  • A Date with Patsy  #1 (Sept. 1957)
  • Sergeant Barney Barker  #1-2 (Aug.-Dec. 1957)
Continues as war title G.I. Tales
  • Sherry the Showgirl  #1-3 (July.-Dec. 1956), continued as
  • Showgirls  #4 (Feb. 1957), continued as
  • Sherry the Showgirl  #5-7 (April-Aug. 1957)
  • Showgirls  Vol. 2, #1-2 (July-Aug. 1957)

HORROR/SCIENCE FICTION

  • Adventures into Terror
  • Astonishing
  • Journey into Mystery,
  • Journey into Unknown Worlds
  • Marvel Tales,
  • Strange Stories of Suspense
  • Strange Tales
  • Strange Tales of the Unusual
  • Suspense

JUNGLE

  • Jann of the Jungle
  • Jungle Action
  • Jungle Tales
  • Lorna, the Jungle Queen, continued as
  • Lorna, the Jungle Girl

ROMANCE

  • Love Adventures  #1-12 (Oct. 1949-Aug. 1952), continued as
  • Actual Confessions  #13-14 (Oct.-Dec. 1952)
  • The Romances of Nurse Helen Grant  #1 (Aug. 1957)

SPORTS

  • Sport Stars  #1 (Nov. 1949), continued as
  • Sports Action  #2-14 (Feb. 1950-Sept. 1952)

WAR

  • 3-D Action  #1 (Jan. 1954)
  • Battle
  • G.I. Tales  #4-6 (Feb.-July 1957)
Continued from humor title Sergeant Barney Barker

WESTERN

  • 3-D Tales of the West  #1 (Jan. 1954)
  • Annie Oakley  #1-11 (Spring 1948 - June 1956)
  • Kid Colt, Hero of the West  #1-2 (Aug.-Oct. 1948)
  • Kid Colt, Outlaw #3- (Dec. 1948 - Marvel Comics)
  • Rawhide Kid  #1-16 (March 1955 - Dec. 1961)
  • Red Warrior  #1-6 (Jan.-Dec. 1951)
  • Ringo Kid Western  #1-4 (Aug. 1954 - Feb. 1955), continued as
  • Ringo Kid  #5-21 (April 1955 - Sept. 1957)

MISC.

  • Bible Tales for Young Folk
  • The Black Knight

References

Footnotes

  • Template:Fnb Interview, The Comics Journal #134 (Feb. 1990), reprinted in The Comics Journal Library, Volume One: Jack Kirby (2002) ISBN 1560974664, p. 38
  • Template:Fnb Ibid., p. 19
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