Marvel Read-Through: The Atlas Era

5 min readOct 7, 2020

A quick history lesson is necessary here: By the late 1940s, superhero comics were not popular, experienced decreased sales, and were, at least at Timely, all cancelled. Timely Comics also became Atlas Comics. The 1950s brought new trends in comics, and Atlas was not publishing superhero comics for a few years. The prominent genres were Western, romance, detective, spy, and humor amongst others. By 1954, they attempted a revival of the superhero genre at Atlas, bringing back Human Torch & Toro, Captain America & Bucky, and the Sub-Mariner in Young Men #24–28. These issues consisted of three 6-page stories, each focusing on one of the main trio of heroes. All three also received their own solo titles, however Torch and Cap’s books only lasted three issues each before cancellation, while Namor’s lasted ten. This superhero revival was short-lived due to its unpopularity at the time, and I personally understand why after reading through the superhero comics of 1950s Marvel.

Human Torch killing Hitler — Yes, they retconned the Human Torch as Hitler’s killer

I’m not saying that the 1950s comics were bad, just that they weren’t anything special, and as an unpopular genre, there’s no way that superheroes would have made an impact in the comic book landscape with average at best stories. The comeback issue was particularly interesting, as it explained where the heroes had been for the past 5 years (although I know from modern-day retcons that this Captain America & Bucky are actually replacements as the originals, Steve Rogers and James Buchanan Barnes, are presumed dead in the 50s). Unfortunately, things dropped off pretty quickly after that issue. All the stories I read were between six and eight pages, and they were almost all very simple and basic. Basically, there was very little that stood out.

Super villain plot of using a giant vaccuum to suck all of Earth’s air — I may not have been enthralled with the 50s, but I got a good chuckle out of this evil plot

Of the main pre-modern Marvel trinity (Human Torch, Captain America, Sub-Mariner), I was surprisingly mostly invested in Namor this time around. Captain America is my favorite of the main Avengers and I was looking forward to delving into his history, but Namor’s solo series, as well as his features in Young Men, had a surprising amount of continuity and continuation through issues, that I enjoyed his stories more than the other two characters. Flip-flopping between his allegiance to humans and to his undersea people, the introduction of his step-cousin Byrrah as a recurring villain, and the exploration of his pre-teen and teenage days in almost every issue of his solo title kept me invested in his character more than the others.

Namor gets mad at humans and says he isn’t superpowered — But Namor, you ARE superhuman!

The art of the 50s is where I will gladly say there was an improvement. It is possible that it’s just the higher quality of scans I found online, but I felt like there was a drastic improvement in the art between the 40s and 50s. I think what I liked so much about the art in the 50s is that the lines were much more prominent (shoutout to the always underrated inkers), making the pictures a lot clearer and it was much easier to tell what was going on in each panel than in the Timely era.

I did check out one single issue that was not under the Marvel superhero umbrella, as it was recommended on one of the many reading orders I have researched. Kent Blake of the Secret Service #13 was one of the more inspired stories that I read from the Atlas era. It really seemed like they put more effort into other genres and superheroes were an afterthought in Atlas’ larger plans. I’m still very unsure why this reading order placed this as recommended reading, but I did enjoy it more than most of the other stuff I read. Tangentially related to Marvel superheroes, I read the original story featuring Groot from Tales to Astonish #13. While this is a different Groot than the famous character, they are of the same species and their publication history is somewhat intertwined so I checked out the origins of the character(s). It was a simple yet clever and effective story, it felt very 1950s sci-fi/horror to me. I would be interested in checking out more of the 50s and 60s anthology books, but that would be at another time and not part of this read-through.

Captain America promoting American capitalism and bashing Soviet-era communism — Captain America, commie smasher

From a historical perspective, I enjoyed seeing the villains evolve from Nazis into communists. These comics definitely feel dated with how many stories were based around the heroes fighting Russian and Korean communists, and the constant reminders to readers about the glory of American capitalism became grating very quickly, but it was a nice piece of comic book history to read about Marvel’s early heroes exploits fighting America’s major threat of the 50s.