Marvel Comics: The Atlas Years

Timely Comics was publishing around eighty separate titles a month by 1950. Many of the titles only lasted a couple of issues, but whenever a title failed another one was waiting to take its place. Publisher Martin Goodman’s belief in flooding the market and following the trends steered the ship of Timely into the new decade.

Communism and Another Try at Superheroes

The atmosphere of the times was very different than it had been a few years earlier. The belief in the “Red Menace” of the Soviet Union and China, and the possibility of infiltration by communist spies began to take center stage in the American consciousness. Likewise, it began to shape the style of comic books.

Marvel tried to tap this spirit with its superheroes, a onetime pillar of the company which had been unpublished for some time, but the mixture never took off. Captain America was retooled as a “Commie Smasher” with an overly didactic feel that failed to catch the original spirit of the Jack Kirby/Joe Simon days. Similarly, the Human Torch, now with atomically enhanced powers, bombed. Both characters revamp only lasted three issues.

The Sub-Mariner fared slightly better, with a ten issue run, due mostly to his creator, Bill Everett, making the book surreal and self-parodying.

The only original Superhero attempted during the ‘50s was Marvel Boy, an alien child from Uranus who fought other aliens and communists on his adopted home of earth—even if it meant dropping atomic bombs on their secret lairs. The book only lasted two issues and, along with the failures of the big three, sealed the fate of superheroes for over a decade.

The Infamous Bullpen and Atlas Publishing

In order to facilitate the publication of so many titles a month, Timely Comics maintained a staff of close to twenty salaried artists that worked on site at the Timely offices in the Empire State Building. Side by side, artists such as John Buscema, Carl Burgos, Gene Colan and Syd Shores would pass around pages, penciling, inking, or critiquing each others work.

It was an amazingly productive system, allowing the men to fraternize and socialize while working, but in the end it proved a little too productive. It was discovered that the bullpen had accumulated a stockpile of excess unpublished work, thousands of pages worth in fact. Publisher Martin Goodman was about to embark on a risky financial venture and this waste gave him all the reason he needed to switch his artists back to freelance and free up the money from their salaries.

This venture was taking Timely Comics from being a distributed product to a self-distributed one. Goodman called his new distributing company Atlas News Company and from there on Timely was no more. All books now carried an Atlas logo on them.

The Seduction of the Innocent

The ‘50s saw the horror and crime genres of comic books soar in popularity. Atlas, of course, pursued them whole heartedly. The company began to churn out tales of supposedly true crime and stories of the most macabre horror. These comics featured new levels of graphic violence and death, most of which was extremely moralistic in nature, with the bad guys always getting it in the end.

In 1954 psychiatrist Dr. Frederic Wertham published a book entitles “Seduction of the Innocent” in which he made claims that comic books were responsible for juvenile delinquency. Wertham asserted that the graphic violence made kids want to be just as violent. He also alleged that comics led to child prostitution, pedophilia, and homosexuality.

Wertham’s book made a tremendous impact, even leading to a senate subcommittee hearing, and many comic book publishers went out of business. The remaining publishers created a "Comics Code" to censor objectionable material with books published under the rules bearing its stamp of approval. Atlas almost went under itself, losing its ability to self-distribute and having to go through rival DC Comics to publish any books at all.

By the end of the ‘50s Atlas was no more and Goodman’s now nameless company could only publish eight titles a month, most of which were little more than Japanese-monster-type books. It was nearly the end for the company.

Read the previous article in this series:

Marvel Comics: The End of the Timely Years

Read the next article in this series:

Marvel Comics: The Start of the Marvel Age

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