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Goodman and Lee approached the Atlas revival by not only doing the exact same thing that they did 10 years earlier (except with commies 'stead of nazis), but doing it not-as-well by keeping the stories ridiculously short, the characters incredibly bland, and eliminating any sense of humor. And yes, the covers were inappropriate. Not to mention folks, please remember that McCarthy was pretty well finished as a political force by April of 1954, so this brand of red-baiting became not so easy to sell.


Excellent points. Although I think the art was probably better at Atlas than at Timely.

I used to own Captain America ("Commie Smasher") 76. I bought it as a cultural artifact. It was dated. And not in the way that early 60s Marvels are dated.

I think that people tend to forget that one reason why Marvel's success is so impressive is that there really wasn't any foreshadowing that it would happen. Timely's Golden Age reputation is largely a retcon based on Marvel's success. Unlike with DC, fans weren't inundating Atlas with a call to revive the Timely heros.

{Which, as an aside, was a good thing, I think. From a fan perspective, FF came out of the blue, and from Stan's perspective he was under no obligation or mandate to just revive Timely. Thus, he had the freedom to create something new.}

In fact, I suspect that back before Marvel came into being, more fans wanted to see a revival of the Fawcett or Quality heros than of the Timely heros. It's only because of Marvel that we look back on the past and ascribe a significance to Timely that I'd contend is excessive in relation to the contents and significance of the actual books.

Think of it this way, how many heros or villains of any significance to pop culture or the Marvel Universe come out of the Timely books? I can only think of two heros (Cap and Subby) and one villain (Red Skull). Contrast that with DC, where scores of heros and villians from those Golden Age books are still in the popular consciousness and are important to the DCU. It's pretty amazing how productive the DC crew was at keeping the Batman/Superman books fresh, adaptive and full of new characters from the 30s to the 50s compared the stagnant formula that a lot of other superhero books seemed to wallow in.