Time After Timely
Future Comic Book Hall of Fame artist Gene Colan, a Marvel mainstay from 1946 on, recalled that, "The atmosphere at Timely was very good, very funny. ... a big art room and there were about 20 artists in there, all stacked up. Syd was in the last row on my side, and there was another row on the other side. Dan DeCarlo was there, several other people — Vince Alascia was an inker; Rudy LaPick sat right behind me," with Mike Sekowsky "in another room".
Yet after the wartime boom years — when superheroes had been new and inspirational, and comics provided cheap entertainment for millions of children, soldiers and others — the post-war era found superheroes falling out of fashion. Television and mass market paperback books now also competed for readers and leisure time. Goodman began turning to a wider variety of genres than ever, emphasizing horror, Westerns, teen humor, crime and war comics, and introducing female heroes to try to attract girls and young women to read comics.
In 1946, for instance, the superhero title All Select Comics was changed to Blonde Phantom Comics, and now starred a masked secretary who fought crime in an evening gown. That same year, Kid Komics eliminated its stars and became Kid Movie Comics. All Winners Comics became All Teen Comics in January 1947. Timely eliminated virtually all its staff positions in 1948.
The precise end-point of the Golden Age of comics is vague, but for Timely, at least, it appears to have ended with the cancellation 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 horror/suspense tales and no superheroes. Sub-Mariner Comics had already ended with #32 (June 1949), and the company's flagship title, Marvel Mystery Comics, starring the Human Torch, ended that same month with #92, becoming the horror anthology Marvel Tales beginning with issue #93 (Aug. 1949). Goodman began using the globe logo of the Atlas News Company, the newsstand-distribution company he owned, on comics cover-dated Nov. 1951.
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