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Marvel Masterworks: Atlas Era
Marvel Masterworks: Atlas Era Heroes, Vol. 1
Book by Marvel Comics
282 pages, Hardcover
First published February 14, 2007
51 people want to read
About the author
Bill Everett
389 books11 followersWilliam Blake Everett, aka Bill Everett, was a comic book writer-artist best known for creating Namor the Sub-Mariner as well as co-creating Zombie and Daredevil with writer Stan Lee for Marvel Comics. He was a descendant of the poet William Blake and of Richard Everett, founder of Dedham, Massachusetts.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
December 23, 2020
These mid-century comics show how what we know as Marvel, right after the end of World War II, kinda didn't know where to go to next. This collection starts off with Marvel Boy, the Boy from Uranus (which might be a part of why this character didn't last long.) Marvel Boy, also known as Bob, has come from the seventh planet to Earth to become an interstellar insurance investigator (yet another reason why he probably didn't last.) Bob fights crime with the power of temporarily blinding people with his shiny bracelet (another nail in his character's coffin.) Frankly. Bob commits as many criminal acts as the criminals he claims to be fighting against. This includes kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment, assault, destruction of federal property (he drops a bomb on the Grand Canyon!), animal abuse (so much animal abuse) and murder.
Eventually Marvel drops Marvel Boy and digs up some of their old classics from WW2. This includes The Human Torch (not to be confused with The Human Torch), the Sub Mariner, and Captain America. These old war-horses are dragged out of retirement to fight the Red Menace. Ghosts on the bottom of the sea bed - Communists. Aliens invading from outer space - Communists.
Eventually Marvel drops Marvel Boy and digs up some of their old classics from WW2. This includes The Human Torch (not to be confused with The Human Torch), the Sub Mariner, and Captain America. These old war-horses are dragged out of retirement to fight the Red Menace. Ghosts on the bottom of the sea bed - Communists. Aliens invading from outer space - Communists.
April 7, 2021
In between the golden age and the beginning of the Marvel age was this grey, weird period where comics weren't sure what to do next.
Westerns, war and horror were becoming big, and super heroes were struggling.
That's where these stories are set.
This volume is split into 2 sections:
Marvel Boy: weird and doesn't quite work. He's a decent character, but the stories are too short and the writers can't decide on the tone. It's all over the place.
Now, when we get to the Human Torch comics, that's where the good stuff happens.
These stories bring back the big three of marvel/Atlas' Golden age: Human Torch, Captain America and the Sub-mariner.
The Torch was revived after being sealed in a lead coffin by gangsters, Cap comes out of retirement when the Red Skull returns and Namor was apparently just shacked up with his GA love interest, hanging out, because he's been exiled by Atlantis.
The art gets better and the three stories each have a different tone and it all becomes a more enjoyable read.
Fun, little time capsule of comics history.
Westerns, war and horror were becoming big, and super heroes were struggling.
That's where these stories are set.
This volume is split into 2 sections:
Marvel Boy: weird and doesn't quite work. He's a decent character, but the stories are too short and the writers can't decide on the tone. It's all over the place.
Now, when we get to the Human Torch comics, that's where the good stuff happens.
These stories bring back the big three of marvel/Atlas' Golden age: Human Torch, Captain America and the Sub-mariner.
The Torch was revived after being sealed in a lead coffin by gangsters, Cap comes out of retirement when the Red Skull returns and Namor was apparently just shacked up with his GA love interest, hanging out, because he's been exiled by Atlantis.
The art gets better and the three stories each have a different tone and it all becomes a more enjoyable read.
Fun, little time capsule of comics history.
August 16, 2020
As has been mentioned on my blog before, by the late 1940s, superheroes had become passe in comic books. A handful continued to be published over at National Publications (DC) on a regular basis, and there was the odd minor publisher title, but other genres had taken over the field. Timely/Marvel/soon to be Atlas ceased publication of its “Big Three” (Captain America, Namor and the Human Torch) in 1949. But publisher Martin Goodman had a brainstorm….
There was a flying saucers craze going on, and Mr. Goodman thought a science fiction-flavored superhero would go down a treat. Thus, Marvel Boy was created in 1950. As explained in the first issue, Professor Matthew Grayson’s wife was murdered by the Nazis in 1934. Realizing that Europe was headed for a great war, and that his atomic research would be abused by whichever government seized it, Professor Grayson built a rocketship to take him and his toddler son Bob to the Moon to live. The ship was thrown off course, and landed on the utopian planet of Uranus. (You should just get all the “your anus” jokes out of your system right now.)
Uranus’ lower gravity gave Bob superior strength, and their advanced peaceful civilization trained him to physical and mental perfection. He even learned a limited (and inconsistently written) form of telepathy! But now that he’s grown, and the Earth humans have discovered atomic power on their own, Bob wants to visit his home world and help them out. Professor Grayson gives Bob a new outfit, uranium pills that will energize Bob’s body and negate the effects of Earth’s higher gravity, and a light-jewel that produces a bright light to blind enemies so that Bob will not have to resort to killing.
Back on Earth, a new “continent” has risen in the South Atlantic. (The scale of events make it more likely to be just a large island.) As it happens, just one ship was in the area, and is now beached on the new continent. That ship is run by the modern-day pirate “Count” Varron. His family was expelled from Bosnia shortly before it was absorbed into Yugoslavia, making him a stateless refugee, and none of the successor states nor any other nation have granted him citizenship. Therefore, he is a man without a country, and under maritime law as the discoverer of this new land owns it and any resources it may possess.
Except that there turn out to be natives, the people who were living here when the continent sank beneath the waves in the 8th Century, and have adapted to underwater life. And under the new international laws, they own the land and you’re not allowed to just take over. But there’s a loophole in the law that will still allow the founding of Varronland. If all the natives are dead before anyone else arrives, Count Varron will own the land free and clear!
But Marvel Boy has arrived on Earth, and he will not stand for this aggression. He’s not keen on the natives killing the criminals, either. However, in the end Varron destroys himself and the continent resinks.
A fair enough beginning. In subsequent stories, Marvel Boy fights a supervillain, an alien invasion, and Communist agents. But even as the first issue of Marvel Boy was being produced, Mr. Goodman decided that science fiction wasn’t the next big thing, horror was. So the title changed to Astonishing with issue #3 and there was a narrative shift towards scary stuff.
The most blatantly horror story was “The Screaming Tombs” in which Marvel Boy fights the anthropomorphic manifestation of Death itself, but other stories had horrific setups explained by science fiction. We also learned that Uranian society was not as Utopian as previously depicted in a story that’s clearly pre-Code as the entire police force is revealed to be corrupt, with only Bob’s independent Youth Patrol remaining clean.
There are back-up stories as well, the most interesting of which is “The Nightmare” written by Hank Chapman with art by Wayne Boring. It’s about a horror comic writer who gets his inspiration from his nightmares. At one point he talks to his editor, creating (so far as I know) the first Stan Lee cameo.
From #7 on, Astonishing became a straight-up horror anthology. Marvel Boy vanished until the late 1960s when Roy Thomas (who wrote the introduction to this volume) brought him back as the Crusader to fight the Fantastic Four and die. He’s since returned in Agents of Atlas.
Bill Everett did most of the art for the series, giving Bob a smug or even slightly sinister appearance in many scenes.
Interestingly, there’s absolutely no secret identity nonsense. Bob Grayson, reporter, insurance investigator and sometimes circus aerialist, never pretends that he isn’t also the superhero Marvel Boy, it’s just that most people don’t connect the two names until he mentions this fact.
In 1953, Mr. Goodman decided the time was right for another try at superheroes. The Adventures of Superman was doing very well on television, so why not cash in? Young Men, previously a comic book about hot rods (after having been several other things) became a superhero comic for issues #24-28. Each issue had three short stories starring the Human Torch and Toro, Captain America and Bucky, and Namor the Sub-Mariner. The Human Torch got all the covers, presumably because a guy who’s on fire is the best visual.
Each of the first issue stories explained why we hadn’t heard from the characters in a while. The Human Torch (actually an android) had had his powers neutralized and was in an airless casket in the desert until nuclear testing breached the container. Steve Rogers, who had been given a super-serum that gave him peak human performance, had retired to become a school teacher and only a fan who wanted to be the new Bucky knew the connection. Captain America only came out of retirement to fight the Communist menace as exemplified by former Nazi Red Skull. And Namor (whose origins I discussed in my review of Essential Sub-Mariner) had gone home to Atlantis, until his old squeeze Betty Dean asks him to look into a series of shipwrecks in the Pacific Ocean.
Per Mr. Thomas’ introduction, most of the people who worked on this brief revival retained very little memory of it, with Stan Lee in particular not even remembering it ever happened unless specifically reminded. Which is not to say these aren’t fun stories. Three in particular stand out to me.
“The Return of…the Human Torch” by Carl Burgos has him and Toro investigating a wave of crime by young men who laugh at the thought of being put behind bars. At the same time, every male senior citizen has vanished from the city’s nursing homes and care facilities! These two things are of course related. Toro’s only known living relative dies.
An untitled Sub-Mariner story by Bill Everett has him investigating a series of shark attacks and disappearances that don’t seem to be shark attacks off the coast of New York, decades before Peter Benchley wrote Jaws. Turns out it’s a race of man-eating shark people…sort of. Very nice art on the shark people.
“Captain America Turns Traitor!” by John Romita is notable for a cameo by both the Human Torch and Namor in the same panel with Cap, the first time since the second and final issue of All-Winners’ Squad. The story itself involves a Red spy attempting to inject Captain America with a “virus of evil” that will turn him into a Communist. It seems to work, with Cap now talking about how there are “good people on both sides” and being willing to visit the Soviet Union as a guest. Bucky is increasingly worried until it turns out Cap was never brainwashed at all.
The revival went on in other titles for about a year, but that’s in the next volume.
While this period isn’t entirely about fighting Communism, it’s clear that editor/writer/plotter Stan Lee went to Reds as stock villains much more than the folks over at DC did.
When the big superhero boom for Marvel happened in the 1960s, the Human Torch was replaced by an entirely new character, Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four. Eventually, retcons came in explaining what had happened to make the Jim Hammond version of the character no longer exist, but newer retcons have now made him alive again. Whether any of his 1950s stories happened is kind of up in the air.
The FF’s comic book also brought back Namor, who’d been amnesiac for “some years” and living in a flophouse as a derelict. Again, the status of the Fifties stories is not clear.
Less lucky was the 1950s version of Captain America, who was retroactively turned into an impostor who’d eventually succumbed to paranoia induced by the flawed supersoldier serum he’d used to duplicate the real Steve Rogers’ abilities. “Crazy Fifties Cap” has since shown up a few times as a villain who is a dark mirror of “real Captain America.” Communist Red Skull was also “revealed” to be an impostor and killed off by the returned Nazi Skull, but not before he turned out to have murdered Peter Parker’s birth parents.
Content note: A fraudulent psychic pretends to be a Muslim and uses a lot of phrases and quotes to make himself sound like a follower of Islam, but no mention is made of how he’s violating the religion’s rules.
This is an important volume for scholars of Marvel’s superhero history, and has fun stories for more casual fans. It’s spendy, so you will probably want to check it out from your local library first to see if you want to invest in a permanent copy.
There was a flying saucers craze going on, and Mr. Goodman thought a science fiction-flavored superhero would go down a treat. Thus, Marvel Boy was created in 1950. As explained in the first issue, Professor Matthew Grayson’s wife was murdered by the Nazis in 1934. Realizing that Europe was headed for a great war, and that his atomic research would be abused by whichever government seized it, Professor Grayson built a rocketship to take him and his toddler son Bob to the Moon to live. The ship was thrown off course, and landed on the utopian planet of Uranus. (You should just get all the “your anus” jokes out of your system right now.)
Uranus’ lower gravity gave Bob superior strength, and their advanced peaceful civilization trained him to physical and mental perfection. He even learned a limited (and inconsistently written) form of telepathy! But now that he’s grown, and the Earth humans have discovered atomic power on their own, Bob wants to visit his home world and help them out. Professor Grayson gives Bob a new outfit, uranium pills that will energize Bob’s body and negate the effects of Earth’s higher gravity, and a light-jewel that produces a bright light to blind enemies so that Bob will not have to resort to killing.
Back on Earth, a new “continent” has risen in the South Atlantic. (The scale of events make it more likely to be just a large island.) As it happens, just one ship was in the area, and is now beached on the new continent. That ship is run by the modern-day pirate “Count” Varron. His family was expelled from Bosnia shortly before it was absorbed into Yugoslavia, making him a stateless refugee, and none of the successor states nor any other nation have granted him citizenship. Therefore, he is a man without a country, and under maritime law as the discoverer of this new land owns it and any resources it may possess.
Except that there turn out to be natives, the people who were living here when the continent sank beneath the waves in the 8th Century, and have adapted to underwater life. And under the new international laws, they own the land and you’re not allowed to just take over. But there’s a loophole in the law that will still allow the founding of Varronland. If all the natives are dead before anyone else arrives, Count Varron will own the land free and clear!
But Marvel Boy has arrived on Earth, and he will not stand for this aggression. He’s not keen on the natives killing the criminals, either. However, in the end Varron destroys himself and the continent resinks.
A fair enough beginning. In subsequent stories, Marvel Boy fights a supervillain, an alien invasion, and Communist agents. But even as the first issue of Marvel Boy was being produced, Mr. Goodman decided that science fiction wasn’t the next big thing, horror was. So the title changed to Astonishing with issue #3 and there was a narrative shift towards scary stuff.
The most blatantly horror story was “The Screaming Tombs” in which Marvel Boy fights the anthropomorphic manifestation of Death itself, but other stories had horrific setups explained by science fiction. We also learned that Uranian society was not as Utopian as previously depicted in a story that’s clearly pre-Code as the entire police force is revealed to be corrupt, with only Bob’s independent Youth Patrol remaining clean.
There are back-up stories as well, the most interesting of which is “The Nightmare” written by Hank Chapman with art by Wayne Boring. It’s about a horror comic writer who gets his inspiration from his nightmares. At one point he talks to his editor, creating (so far as I know) the first Stan Lee cameo.
From #7 on, Astonishing became a straight-up horror anthology. Marvel Boy vanished until the late 1960s when Roy Thomas (who wrote the introduction to this volume) brought him back as the Crusader to fight the Fantastic Four and die. He’s since returned in Agents of Atlas.
Bill Everett did most of the art for the series, giving Bob a smug or even slightly sinister appearance in many scenes.
Interestingly, there’s absolutely no secret identity nonsense. Bob Grayson, reporter, insurance investigator and sometimes circus aerialist, never pretends that he isn’t also the superhero Marvel Boy, it’s just that most people don’t connect the two names until he mentions this fact.
In 1953, Mr. Goodman decided the time was right for another try at superheroes. The Adventures of Superman was doing very well on television, so why not cash in? Young Men, previously a comic book about hot rods (after having been several other things) became a superhero comic for issues #24-28. Each issue had three short stories starring the Human Torch and Toro, Captain America and Bucky, and Namor the Sub-Mariner. The Human Torch got all the covers, presumably because a guy who’s on fire is the best visual.
Each of the first issue stories explained why we hadn’t heard from the characters in a while. The Human Torch (actually an android) had had his powers neutralized and was in an airless casket in the desert until nuclear testing breached the container. Steve Rogers, who had been given a super-serum that gave him peak human performance, had retired to become a school teacher and only a fan who wanted to be the new Bucky knew the connection. Captain America only came out of retirement to fight the Communist menace as exemplified by former Nazi Red Skull. And Namor (whose origins I discussed in my review of Essential Sub-Mariner) had gone home to Atlantis, until his old squeeze Betty Dean asks him to look into a series of shipwrecks in the Pacific Ocean.
Per Mr. Thomas’ introduction, most of the people who worked on this brief revival retained very little memory of it, with Stan Lee in particular not even remembering it ever happened unless specifically reminded. Which is not to say these aren’t fun stories. Three in particular stand out to me.
“The Return of…the Human Torch” by Carl Burgos has him and Toro investigating a wave of crime by young men who laugh at the thought of being put behind bars. At the same time, every male senior citizen has vanished from the city’s nursing homes and care facilities! These two things are of course related. Toro’s only known living relative dies.
An untitled Sub-Mariner story by Bill Everett has him investigating a series of shark attacks and disappearances that don’t seem to be shark attacks off the coast of New York, decades before Peter Benchley wrote Jaws. Turns out it’s a race of man-eating shark people…sort of. Very nice art on the shark people.
“Captain America Turns Traitor!” by John Romita is notable for a cameo by both the Human Torch and Namor in the same panel with Cap, the first time since the second and final issue of All-Winners’ Squad. The story itself involves a Red spy attempting to inject Captain America with a “virus of evil” that will turn him into a Communist. It seems to work, with Cap now talking about how there are “good people on both sides” and being willing to visit the Soviet Union as a guest. Bucky is increasingly worried until it turns out Cap was never brainwashed at all.
The revival went on in other titles for about a year, but that’s in the next volume.
While this period isn’t entirely about fighting Communism, it’s clear that editor/writer/plotter Stan Lee went to Reds as stock villains much more than the folks over at DC did.
When the big superhero boom for Marvel happened in the 1960s, the Human Torch was replaced by an entirely new character, Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four. Eventually, retcons came in explaining what had happened to make the Jim Hammond version of the character no longer exist, but newer retcons have now made him alive again. Whether any of his 1950s stories happened is kind of up in the air.
The FF’s comic book also brought back Namor, who’d been amnesiac for “some years” and living in a flophouse as a derelict. Again, the status of the Fifties stories is not clear.
Less lucky was the 1950s version of Captain America, who was retroactively turned into an impostor who’d eventually succumbed to paranoia induced by the flawed supersoldier serum he’d used to duplicate the real Steve Rogers’ abilities. “Crazy Fifties Cap” has since shown up a few times as a villain who is a dark mirror of “real Captain America.” Communist Red Skull was also “revealed” to be an impostor and killed off by the returned Nazi Skull, but not before he turned out to have murdered Peter Parker’s birth parents.
Content note: A fraudulent psychic pretends to be a Muslim and uses a lot of phrases and quotes to make himself sound like a follower of Islam, but no mention is made of how he’s violating the religion’s rules.
This is an important volume for scholars of Marvel’s superhero history, and has fun stories for more casual fans. It’s spendy, so you will probably want to check it out from your local library first to see if you want to invest in a permanent copy.
January 23, 2015
Superheroes died out at Marvel's Golden Age predecessor timely in 1949 and the whole genre was in decline. By 1951, he once mighty Captain Marvel would leave Fawcett and essentially Superheroes would be down to the big 3: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman and wouldn't really return in force until the Silver Age began in the late 50s.
This book chronicles two separate revivals with the great Roy Thomas offering commentary in the introduction on both.
The first is actually pretty inexpiicable as publisher Martin Goodman launched a brand new every other month Superhero title at the time Superhero titles were failing daily. The first more than half of the book is about the adventures of Marvel Boy as told in Marvel Boy 1 and 2 which was renamed to Astonishing for Issues 3-6. Marvel Boy is a boy who was born on Earth but raised on Uranus and so has amazing powers on Uranus but not on Earth unless he takes powerful pills. The character had a lot of potential, but didn't realize it because of the times it was being written in. In a normal comic, continuity and a status quo is established. Here, it seemed like Atlas wanted to have the benefits of established continuity without actually having to establish facts the rules of the world in the pages of the comic. So, boom, Marvel Boy is an insurance Investigator in addition to being an interplanetary hero. Marvel Boy's opponents ranged from conmen to Communists to alien invaders. It's an interesting spread of adversaries. The comic wasn't bad. Perhaps, a little underdeveloped, but enjoyable.
The second part of the book features the returns of Marvel's Golden Age Big 3 (Captain America, the Sub-mariner, and the Human Torch) in 1953 with the critical and ratings success of the Adventures of Superman on TV. This book features five short 7-9 page adventures for each hero as collected in Young Men #24-28. The comics are actually all very entertaining for their lengths.
While all have been stereotyped as anti-Communist stories, actually only Captain America's were all anti-Communists. The Human Torch's first story featured the Torch fighting Communism (and Communist brainwashing of his sidekicked which was corrected within a single page) but the rest were more fantastic stories that focused on non-ideological threats. The Sub-mariner stories were about 50/50.
However, I love the idea of these characters fighting Communism particularly in the wake of Stalin's brutal regime. The Captain America stories were solid with two stories featuring the Red Skull which is always a plus. The one minus was that the book seemed to forget its continuity with Steve Rogers being a professor in Issue 25 and then back to being in the Army later. (Maybe he got called up for Korea.) Regardless, it'd be up to Steven Engelhart to remove this continuity from Roger's past, lest Captain America be seen as standing up against Soviet aggression.
The Torch remains as enjoyable as ever, and probably benefits from the more fantastic enemies. Namor benefited enormously from still being drawn by original artist Bill Everett. Namor was Marvel's most enjoyable Golden Age character and he still was during this Atomic age, although a few of his mannerisms seem very 1950s in ways that don't fit with the Golden Age or his later appearances.
Overall, this is a great forgotten part of comic book history that's a fantastic read for any fan.
This book chronicles two separate revivals with the great Roy Thomas offering commentary in the introduction on both.
The first is actually pretty inexpiicable as publisher Martin Goodman launched a brand new every other month Superhero title at the time Superhero titles were failing daily. The first more than half of the book is about the adventures of Marvel Boy as told in Marvel Boy 1 and 2 which was renamed to Astonishing for Issues 3-6. Marvel Boy is a boy who was born on Earth but raised on Uranus and so has amazing powers on Uranus but not on Earth unless he takes powerful pills. The character had a lot of potential, but didn't realize it because of the times it was being written in. In a normal comic, continuity and a status quo is established. Here, it seemed like Atlas wanted to have the benefits of established continuity without actually having to establish facts the rules of the world in the pages of the comic. So, boom, Marvel Boy is an insurance Investigator in addition to being an interplanetary hero. Marvel Boy's opponents ranged from conmen to Communists to alien invaders. It's an interesting spread of adversaries. The comic wasn't bad. Perhaps, a little underdeveloped, but enjoyable.
The second part of the book features the returns of Marvel's Golden Age Big 3 (Captain America, the Sub-mariner, and the Human Torch) in 1953 with the critical and ratings success of the Adventures of Superman on TV. This book features five short 7-9 page adventures for each hero as collected in Young Men #24-28. The comics are actually all very entertaining for their lengths.
While all have been stereotyped as anti-Communist stories, actually only Captain America's were all anti-Communists. The Human Torch's first story featured the Torch fighting Communism (and Communist brainwashing of his sidekicked which was corrected within a single page) but the rest were more fantastic stories that focused on non-ideological threats. The Sub-mariner stories were about 50/50.
However, I love the idea of these characters fighting Communism particularly in the wake of Stalin's brutal regime. The Captain America stories were solid with two stories featuring the Red Skull which is always a plus. The one minus was that the book seemed to forget its continuity with Steve Rogers being a professor in Issue 25 and then back to being in the Army later. (Maybe he got called up for Korea.) Regardless, it'd be up to Steven Engelhart to remove this continuity from Roger's past, lest Captain America be seen as standing up against Soviet aggression.
The Torch remains as enjoyable as ever, and probably benefits from the more fantastic enemies. Namor benefited enormously from still being drawn by original artist Bill Everett. Namor was Marvel's most enjoyable Golden Age character and he still was during this Atomic age, although a few of his mannerisms seem very 1950s in ways that don't fit with the Golden Age or his later appearances.
Overall, this is a great forgotten part of comic book history that's a fantastic read for any fan.
January 23, 2014
I know a lot of folks have reviewed this and not exactly been kind with most of the stories in it, but I found this Marvel Masterworks a fun read. It's hard to go wrong with so much Bill Everett artwork and story. He plays up his "goofy" art style to the hilt here, as sort of a modern Basil Wolverton.
True, the whole book is violently jingoistic; there are now Communists behind every problem, even a lot of the simple crimes. But you've got to read these while considering the era they were written in. Five years earlier, you would've followed the adventures of "Jap-busters" and the various inhuman depictions of Asians in the name of war propaganda.
The Marvel Boy/Astonishing stories are all over the place. It is kind of hard to believe Bob Grayson could take the mundane job of insurance investigator when he's probably the smartest person on the planet at the time. His adventures either have him helping stop major invasions by aliens or exposing insurance fraud. I do like how the entire comics were reprinted, including the non-Marvel Boy and text features. That was definitely a breath of fresh air.
The reprints of Young Men are pretty indicative of why super-heroes were fading as a genre: No proper attention to continuity and not much care given to the stories themselves. Everett's Sub-Mariner tales are excellent, But Carl Burgo's Human Torch stories (even with the assist by Russ Heath on the first one), and John Romita's Captain America tales are sorely lacking. Far too much "Red menace" and far too little trying to keep things straight. Cap apparently rejoins the Army between issues, I guess to help with the "spy-busting" storylines. The problem with both is that most of the stories start in the middle of a fight and we're left to pick up the story threads as we go; usually easy but sometimes you don't even care. I will give Burgos and co. props for having a villain (the Vulture) who carries over between two stories. I can't think of many actual Torch villains, other than Hitler (who we do see getting canonically 'torched') and the Asbestos Lady, of course.
I'm seriously thinking about getting the other two volumes in the Atlas Era Heroes series of Marvel Masterworks. I'd like to see if these stories improved or not, and I'm sure just the Bill Everett artwork on Sub-Mariner will make them worth whatever discount price I can find them at on Amazon or eBay.
I don't think this book is a good fit for the average, modern comic book fan. You'll get yourself too up in arms over the Commie-baiting, the artwork and the weird storylines. This is one of those books for the old school fan. If you like comic books as a medium and enjoy golden age super-heroes, then you should give this book a read. Just remember this is spawned from the age of McCarthyism, and has similar attitudes.
True, the whole book is violently jingoistic; there are now Communists behind every problem, even a lot of the simple crimes. But you've got to read these while considering the era they were written in. Five years earlier, you would've followed the adventures of "Jap-busters" and the various inhuman depictions of Asians in the name of war propaganda.
The Marvel Boy/Astonishing stories are all over the place. It is kind of hard to believe Bob Grayson could take the mundane job of insurance investigator when he's probably the smartest person on the planet at the time. His adventures either have him helping stop major invasions by aliens or exposing insurance fraud. I do like how the entire comics were reprinted, including the non-Marvel Boy and text features. That was definitely a breath of fresh air.
The reprints of Young Men are pretty indicative of why super-heroes were fading as a genre: No proper attention to continuity and not much care given to the stories themselves. Everett's Sub-Mariner tales are excellent, But Carl Burgo's Human Torch stories (even with the assist by Russ Heath on the first one), and John Romita's Captain America tales are sorely lacking. Far too much "Red menace" and far too little trying to keep things straight. Cap apparently rejoins the Army between issues, I guess to help with the "spy-busting" storylines. The problem with both is that most of the stories start in the middle of a fight and we're left to pick up the story threads as we go; usually easy but sometimes you don't even care. I will give Burgos and co. props for having a villain (the Vulture) who carries over between two stories. I can't think of many actual Torch villains, other than Hitler (who we do see getting canonically 'torched') and the Asbestos Lady, of course.
I'm seriously thinking about getting the other two volumes in the Atlas Era Heroes series of Marvel Masterworks. I'd like to see if these stories improved or not, and I'm sure just the Bill Everett artwork on Sub-Mariner will make them worth whatever discount price I can find them at on Amazon or eBay.
I don't think this book is a good fit for the average, modern comic book fan. You'll get yourself too up in arms over the Commie-baiting, the artwork and the weird storylines. This is one of those books for the old school fan. If you like comic books as a medium and enjoy golden age super-heroes, then you should give this book a read. Just remember this is spawned from the age of McCarthyism, and has similar attitudes.
April 18, 2018
I picked it up at this year's Heroes Con because I thought it would be interesting to get the back story on Atlas' (Marvel's) failed attempt to bring back superheroes in the early 1950s. I hate to say it, but the quality of the stories was so bad that it is plain why it failed --- along with Wertham's nonsense. The artwork is actually pretty good, but the Marvel Boy character was utterly mediocre. The art for Captain America (John Romita) and Sub-Mariner (Bill Everett) was better than average, but the CA stories felt constipated. He fought Communism, which admittedly was on everyone's mind in 1953, but the fight lacked the over-the-top energy of ten years before, when Cap had been punching Hitler in the bazoo. Worse still is the Sub-Mariner, who functions as a sort of on-call boyfriend for Betty Dean (anyone else remember the issue in the late 1960's where they brought the character back as an old woman, able to stop the eternally young Sub-Mariner in mid-rage?). He speaks pure American, which of course was also the case in the 1940s, but fifty years of Imperious Rex has taken its toll on character expectations.
The really astonishing part for me has been Marvel's re-invention of the characters during the past decade or so. So it was worth it to see the antecedents, but if you are not following the Agents of Atlas series, I can't imagine that this book would be of much interest.
The really astonishing part for me has been Marvel's re-invention of the characters during the past decade or so. So it was worth it to see the antecedents, but if you are not following the Agents of Atlas series, I can't imagine that this book would be of much interest.
May 25, 2025
This book collects the 1950 and 51 issues of Marvel Boy / Astonishing, and the first few 1953 issues of Young Men which featured the short-lived revival of the Human Torch, Captain America, and Sub-Mariner. Aside from two stories reprinted in 60s comics I owned in my youth, I'd never seen any of these before.
Big themes throughout the many short stories in this book include anti-Communism, atomic power, space travel, and pro-Americanism. These heroes believed in their government - I can't remember which one it was who turned over bad guys information to the Congressional committee investigating communism at the time. There's a panel in one story wherein the hero looks at an atomic explosion and says it's a beautiful thing as long as it was for freedom.
Obviously, these are not objectively good comic books. But they are energetic, and full of terrific artwork from underpaid talents who never let themselves get bored working on scripts by mostly unknown writers. (I think Bill Everett might have written a lot of the stories he drew, especially the Sub-Mariner ones.)
Each of the ten 32-page comic books included herein are reprinted with every story including non-superhero sci-fi and horror tales, and the required two-page text stories that allowed the comic books to get cheap mailing privileges. It's a glimpse into a period of Marvel Comics evolution I wasn't familiar with for the most part.
Big themes throughout the many short stories in this book include anti-Communism, atomic power, space travel, and pro-Americanism. These heroes believed in their government - I can't remember which one it was who turned over bad guys information to the Congressional committee investigating communism at the time. There's a panel in one story wherein the hero looks at an atomic explosion and says it's a beautiful thing as long as it was for freedom.
Obviously, these are not objectively good comic books. But they are energetic, and full of terrific artwork from underpaid talents who never let themselves get bored working on scripts by mostly unknown writers. (I think Bill Everett might have written a lot of the stories he drew, especially the Sub-Mariner ones.)
Each of the ten 32-page comic books included herein are reprinted with every story including non-superhero sci-fi and horror tales, and the required two-page text stories that allowed the comic books to get cheap mailing privileges. It's a glimpse into a period of Marvel Comics evolution I wasn't familiar with for the most part.
December 13, 2024
I skimmed mostly because of poor dialog & disgusting racial stereotypes.
September 26, 2018
It’s hard slogging through parts of this. The Marvel Boy stories were uniformly “meh” with a side of dull. Easy to see why it didn’t last.
The Torch and Cap stories were a little better, but not much. Especially the Cap stories with the jingoistic, anti-communism basis of almost every yarn. Also the repeat of the “Cap seems to go nuts, but is secretly strung along her bad guys while Bucky grows concerned” within a couple issues was...disappointing.
The jewel of this collection is the Submariner yarns. Suffering Shad, these were fun! And the Bill Everett art was particularly good.
The Torch and Cap stories were a little better, but not much. Especially the Cap stories with the jingoistic, anti-communism basis of almost every yarn. Also the repeat of the “Cap seems to go nuts, but is secretly strung along her bad guys while Bucky grows concerned” within a couple issues was...disappointing.
The jewel of this collection is the Submariner yarns. Suffering Shad, these were fun! And the Bill Everett art was particularly good.
Read
January 12, 2014I'm just not a fan. These stories just didn't work for me and I'll be putting this on the trade-in pile. I usually like Golden Age comics, but this is after the glory had faded. The Marvel Boy stories are a mess, they don't know if they want him to be a science fiction character or an insurance investigator. His main power is that he has flashlights on his wrists. The Human Torch, Namor and Captain America tales are strident anti-communist agit prop. This was an effort to get through once, I'll never want to read it again.
January 21, 2016
After the implementation of the Comics Code in the late 1940s superheroes disappeared from comics. In the 1950s for a brief period Marvel comics brought back their big 3: Captain America, the Human Torch and the Sub-mariner. With WWII over the heroes now fought the evil Red Menace of Communism. This volume reprints the hard-to-find issues. Recommended
August 25, 2008
I learned from this that I actually kind of like the Sub-mariner. Also, Captain America used to totally shoot people all the time.
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