After The Golden Age
Atlas Comics grew out of Timely Comics, the company Goodman founded in 1939 and whose star characters during the 1930s and 1940s 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.
Timely stopped producing superhero comics 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 suspense stories and no superheroes. The company's flagship title, Marvel Mystery Comics, starring the Human Torch, had already ended its run (with #92, June 1949), as had Sub-Mariner Comics (with #32, the same month). The company did make one more attempt at superheroes with the publication of Marvel Boy #1-2 (Dec. 1950 - Feb. 1951), which was retitled Astonishing with issue #3 (April 1951) and continued the feature through #6 (Oct. 1951).
In lieu of superheroes, Goodman's new comic-book line expanded into a wider variety of genres than even Timely had published, emphasizing horror, Westerns, humor, funny-animal, men's adventure-drama, crime, and war comics, later adding a helping of jungle, romance, espionage, medieval adventure, Bible stories, and sports comics. As did other publishers, Atlas also offered humorous comics about models and career women.
Goodman began using the globe logo of the Atlas News Company, the newsstand-distribution company he owned, on comics cover-dated November 1951 even though another company, Kable News, continued to distribute his comics through the August 1952 issues, with its "K" logo and the logo of the independent distributors' union appearing alongside the Atlas globe. 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.).
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