"Atlas at War!" Topic

"Before Marvel Comics was Marvel Comics, it was known as Atlas (and before that, Timely). While most of us today associate Marvel with the colorful superheroes dominating the movies, there was a time, just after World War II, when superhero comics died. Only three superhero characters––Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman––stayed in continuous publication throughout the post-war years until the revival of the genre with the reboots of The Flash in 1956, Green Lantern in 1959, and the creation of the Justice League in 1960. In between those years, comic books remained popular, but instead of superheroes, the four-color pages were dominated by romance stories, westerns, horror, and, of course, war. The latter is the subject of this new collection, published by Dead Reckoning, the relatively new imprint from Naval University Press that focuses on comics.

The 50 stories in Atlas at War! range from 1951 to 1960, curated by comics history author Michael Vassallo, who has previously written on the history of Marvel Comics with digitally remastered artwork. Most of the stories are about the Korean War and World War II, although there are a few stories about other conflicts. Readers will be interested to see early, non-superhero, work by famed creators such as Stan Lee, Jack Kirby (both responsible for co-creating the majority of the Marvel universe heroes), and Steve Ditko, who defined the early periods of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. A vast array of other, lesser-known to today's readers, talents contribute fascinating work as well. However, while this collection of early war comics will please older readers who might nostalgically remember these types of stories from their youth, and provide fascinating historiographical insight into how popular culture contributed to the culturally constructed memory of these wars, the work could probably benefit from more contextualization, analysis, and commentary. Yet, preserving and reintroducing these stories into the conversation on history and memory is a worthy goal in and of itself…"
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