Back in the 1950s, the publisher that would someday be Marvel Comics was known as Atlas Comics. One thing that Atlas was known for was volume, in that it had a tendency to jump on various trends and flood the market with a given genre, before canceling all those books to jump on the next trend. When the Korean War began in 1950, the trend Atlas milked was war comics.
Did I mention volume? The foreword to “Atlas at War!” notes the publisher released 125 war stories across 17 titles in 1952 alone, and in 1953 Atlas released as many as 14 war titles a month!
Atlas war titles began to wane when the Korean War ended in July 1953, and the Comics Code of 1954 watered down war comics altogether. A distribution disaster in 1957 further reduced Atlas’ output, not just of war books, but of all titles.
I should note that while all these stories are pretty good, none is great. For one thing, most of these stories might well be classified as propaganda. While allowing that war is hell — the suffering of the troops is a feature, not a bug — Americans are always the good guys, and almost always win. Bad guys, when Japanese or Korean, are ugly caricatures painful to the modern eye. And given that the stories are generally 3 to 5 pages long, you’re not going to find any deep character studies, complicated plots or Shakespearean drama.
People are also reading…
So why read this book? Because of the art, man, because of the art. This book is a visual treat, whether you’re a comics fan or not. So ignore the words where they’re dumb, and the racial caricatures where they’re painful, and the obvious patriotic rah-rah. Just look at the purty pictures. They are, the expression goes, worth the price of admission.
