Atlas, future Marvel
Atlas Comics is the 1950s 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.
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.
Goodman began using the globe logo of Atlas (see above), the newsstand-distribution company he owned, on comics cover-dated November 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 (drawn and most stories written by Bill Everett), and Captain America (writer Stan Lee, artist John Romita Sr.). Yet they featured the same sort of Communist Red Scare villains as the late-'40s comics, broke no new ground, and looked old-fashioned[neutrality disputed] — particularly in comparison with the clean, uncluttered, streamlined reimagining of super-speedster The Flash two years later in DC Comics' Showcase #4 (Sept. 1956), which would successfully bring back superheroes and kick off the Silver Age of comics.
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 movie monsters another time — and even other comic books, particularly the EC horror line. Until the early 1960s, when editor-in-chief and head writer Stan Lee would help revolutionize comic books with the advent of The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, Atlas was content to flood newsstands with profitable, cheaply produced product — often, despite itself, beautifully rendered by talented if low-paid young artists.
The Atlas "bullpen" had at least five staff writers (officially called editors) besides Lee: Hank Chapman, Paul S. Newman, Don Rico, Carl Wessler, and, in the teen-humor division, future MAD Magazine cartoonist Al Jaffee. Daniel Keyes, future author of Flowers for Algernon, was an associate editor circa 1952. Other writers, generally freelance, included Robert Bernstein.
The artists — some freelance, some on staff — included such veterans as Human Torch creator Carl Burgos and Sub-Mariner creator Bill Everett. The next generation included the prolific and much-admired Joe Maneely, who before his death just prior to Marvel's 1960s breakthrough was the company's leading artist, providing many covers and doing work in all genres, most notably on Westerns and on the medieval adventure The Black Knight. Others included Russ Heath, Gene Colan, and the fledgling, highly individualistic Steve Ditko.
Atlas' most prominent Western titles, many reprinted in the 1970s, were Ringo Kid, with art by Maneely, Fred Kida and John Severin; Doug Wildey's The Outlaw Kid; Jack Keller's Kid Colt, Outlaw and the anthology Gunsmoke Western, starring Kid Colt; and The Black Rider, by Maneely, Syd Shores and others. (The Atlas versions of two prominent '60s Western characters, the Rawhide Kid and the Two-Gun Kid, were different and historically undistinguished iterations.)
