Timely to Atlas, history question

[ft88]

What is the history behind the move from Timely to Atlas? Was it just a different ownership in publishing? And did the key people stick around during the transition?

 

Its never really been clear to me and I haven't heard of a book or article that discussed it.

 

Ed

[Scrooge]

What is the history behind the move from Timely to Atlas? Was it just a different ownership in publishing? And did the key people stick around during the transition?

 

Its never really been clear to me and I haven't heard of a book or article that discussed it.

 

Ed

 

Ed,

 

nothing changed through that time period. According to the Wikipedia (grain of salt required as usual but it seems on the money this time),

 

"Goodman began using the globe logo of Atlas, the newsstand-distribution company he owned, on comics cover-dated November 1951. This united a line put out by the same publisher, staff and freelancers through 59 shell companies, from Animirth Comics to Zenith Publications."

 

As you know, as collectors, we differentiate the Timely period from the Atlas period by content but the transition was purely a business decision and did not impact the editorial decisions and direction.

 

In the statement above from the Wikipedia, I am not 100% of two aspects: 1) that Goodman's independent newsstand distribution company used only the Globe as a logo and 2) IIRC, after they started using the Atlas name, some books were still published under other names (at least in the indicia).

 

For more information about this, you should refer to Alter Ego # 49. I can look at it again tonight if you want more info.

 

 

[Scrooge]

A quick dig through the Timely / Atlas archive unearth what Gifflefunk uses for reference:

 

"I went with the simple approach...

 

Pre-"standard globe logo" as the Timely era (which include the Marvel dot and Lover's heart logo periods), "standard globe logo" up to the "consistent use of the M over C logo" as the Atlas era and the "consistent use of the M over C logo" to today as being Marvel. Or basically:

 

Timely: Oct 1939-Oct 1951

Atlas : Nov 1951-Jul 1961

Marvel: Aug 1961-Present

 

I went with this simple approach as it makes it easy to sort books by cover features (no standard globe and pre-CCA code=Timely; standard globe, or, no globe and CCA code=Atlas)."

[ft88]

Cool thanks. Maybe it was a natural progression or a hindsight bias but it seems like the style of the Timelys changed with the move to Atlas. Adding the Horror lines and ending many of the funny animal lines all happened around the time of the change so I wondered if it were more than just a change in logo. Similar to going from Atlas to Marvel.

 

If anything, these dates/changes seem to dilineate Golden Age from Atomic Age as good as anything else.

 

Ed

[rjpb]

I don't have any of my comic reference books or my collection with me right now - but didn't Goodman put the Atlas logo on a few Golden Age books during the Timely era (I'm thinking it was even during the war era)? It seems he couldn't really decide what to call the company until he settled on Atlas in the 50s.

[adamstrange]

The artists that worked for Atlas in the 50s are confused when you ask them about "Atlas". Atlas was the distributor and they generally refer to working for Timely. The name change to Marvel was a noticeable event.

[esquirecomics]

The artists that worked for Atlas in the 50s are confused when you ask them about "Atlas". Atlas was the distributor and they generally refer to working for Timely. The name change to Marvel was a noticeable event.

 

Anyone know what prompted the name change from Atlas? And why to "Marvel"? No doubt I have a book that explains this, but I'm lazy!

[adamstrange]

Atlas was closed down by Martin Goodman for not making money. There is thought that it was due accounting changes (or possibly manipulation) and not necessarily because it was unprofitable. They then switched to the largest distributor in the US which shortly thereafter went bankrupt forcing Goodman to distribute via National (DC). I think it was Bob B that has documented this history but don't quote me.

[rodan57]

What is the history behind the move from Timely to Atlas? Was it just a different ownership in publishing? And did the key people stick around during the transition?

 

Its never really been clear to me and I haven't heard of a book or article that discussed it.

 

Ed

 

Not a site with a coherent history of Atlas, but a good site for exploring the range of their publications: Atlas Tales .

 

Dennis

[Jamie Coville]

From what I've read, the change from Atlas to American News Group was due to a power play inside Goodman's publishing empire (remember, they did a lot more than comics).

 

Basically two top executives were butting heads, a guy who handled distribution and the guy who ran editorial (of everything which included pulps and magazines). The guy that ran editorial wanted complete control and convinced Goodman to shut down Atlas and sign up with American News instead, which would depower the distribution executive. It's quite possible the distribution exec was mucking with editorial.

 

Goodman eventually agreed, probably because American News owned Union News (which owned many, many prime newsstands across the US). American News wasn't letting any magazines into the Union News newsstands unless they went exclusive with them. By shutting down Atlas and switching to American, their magazines would be carried at those prime spots and sales would increase. I also wouldn't be surprised if Atlas was hurting due to American News tactics.

 

But what American News was doing was illegal and the government charged them with breaking anti-trust laws. Not long after Goodman went to American, they settled out of court with the government, agreed to allow all distributors to have access to Union News Newsstands. Then American sold off a bunch of their prime real estate and downgraded themselves to a smaller, regional distributor.

 

This more than anything is what caused the economic collapse of the comic book market in the mid 50s. American News distributed about half the entire comic industry at that point and a whole lot of publishers needed a new distributor. I'm sure that the few national distributors that were left were flooded with requests from publishers asking about distributing their line of books, and I suspect there was some serious cherry picking going on in regards to who they distributed and what specific titles. Sales had already been dropping pretty bad and this was the killing blow for many publishers. Many mid & small publishers sold their best selling titles to another publisher and got out of the business.

 

When all was said and done, the comic industry went from about 600 books shipped monthly to 300. A lot of artists out of work. The only publishers that were safe were the ones with solid distribution. DC and Charlton distributed their own books. ACG was part owned by the DC owners and had distribution through them. Harvey owners had a personal relationship with national distributor P.D.C. Dell, Archie and Classic Illustrated were high selling books (and clean too, no Wertham controversy with those books) so they had no problems finding a new distributor (Dell would just create their own national distributor). Marvel hung on via the limited generosity of DC/Independent. MAD also found distribution (I believe they also landed with DC). But everybody else would end up going under within a few years.

 

I'm pretty certain Goodman would up kicking himself for shutting down Atlas. Had he hung on another year he would have had access to Union News newsstands and been one of the national distributors cherry picking titles. They also wouldn't have had the restrictions that DC put in place either. The entire industry would have changed.

 

 

[comicparadox]

That sounds definitive! Thanks.

[Robert Beerbohm]

i had a few spare moments, came to the boards again, saw this thread, thought i would pipe in. Some good points made in previous posts here, and here is how i see parts of the discussion.

 

I call everything from Marvel (Mystery) Comics #1 up Oct 1939 by what they are: Marvel Comics

 

Just like every one seems to call everything from New Fun #1 up: DC Comics

 

it has baffled me for decades why there is no seeming distinction amongst collectors

 

1) re the "name" with the myriad companies Harry Donenfeld owned which were not brought under one roof until Superman DC National went with a public stock offering in 1961 - everybody calls it all DC Comics, even though Donenfeld had nothing to do with the earliest Major W-N comic books (even though his earliest stuff were tabloid bedsheet size)

 

2) people want to break down Goodman's publishing empire into three distinct "different" groups: Timely, Atlas, Marvel

 

 

 

And Re Amerian News Company or ANC

 

They began as a loose confederation of localized distributors in the middle of USA's Civil War. By 1864 they were paying to fund many magazines & periodicals for distribution to 100s of 1000s of Union Troops waging war all over America.

 

A generation later they were a defacto monopoly of all these periodical distributed on a national basis.

 

By the 1890s they out-right owned something like 90,000 out of some 115,000 outlets for periodicals in the USA.

 

Competition between the two orgs was fierce - think Al Capone in Chicago on some levels. Indeed, the analagy can easily be made because orgs like Independent News were born from a pressing need to keep 1000s of truck drivers employed following the recinding of the Volstead Act in 1932.

 

Paul Sampliner and Harry Donenfeld took advantage of a situation and fought with ANC for 25 years creating along with others a loose confederation of independent distributors and large retail chains which no longer want to be under ANC's monopoly thumb.

 

By 1949 the independent distributors (of which Indpendent News was just a member out of many others) has wrested industry sage Street & Smith, one of ANC's first customers beack during the Civil War.

 

By 1953 the US Senate began looking deeply into ANC's long-held mob connections. The Independent Distributors (of which IN was a founding member) had finally contributed more money than ANC to members of Congress that they tore into ANC in that McCarthy Era when it was so easy to blame the lowly comic book for all of society's woes regarding "The Children" of whom 95% of America's non-adults professed being a regular reader of "comics" albeit also in the nations newspapers. Funny thing, some 90% of all adults below age 50 also confessed their sins in polls as being regular readers of "comics" as well

 

Like Fawcett simply stopped publishing their comic book, selling parts to Charlton and DC National taking over a few like Hopalong Cassidy, ANC simply stopped to end a long-running legal battle as well as erosion of their core prodcuts. They hustled Goodman's business manager (Sam Cohen?) into talking Goodman into coming into their world -

 

 

By 1957 ANC signed a consent decree with the Feds. ANC divested all their distribution which was actually a smart business move on their part by the time they did it in 1957.

 

They stayed in real estate (remember, they owned some 90,000 outlets by the dawn of the 20th Century)

 

They also stayed in retail, keeping some of the lucrative chains they owned - some of which can be traced to chains still in existence today. Their earliest vision of control was signing contracts to retail in most all train stations. They also moved in to control the bus stations and air ports as those industries developed. Once America began being more on the move by the late 1950s as the Eisenhower Interstate System evolved, bus stations and train stations proved to be not so lucrative any more. Air ports obviously were another story.

 

I have been fortunate to obtain a complete run of their industry magazine American News Trade Journal (think Diamond Dialog) handed out free to all retailers and anyone else in the periodical business which ran 1919-1957

 

I also have most copies of Newsdealer which ran 1946-1964 and then did a name change to Best Seller - the same format trade journal for the 900 odd "independent" distributors and retail outlets begun by ANC 27 years earlier

 

Actually, all major distributors like Fawcett, Kable, etc published monthly trade journals - [ i have representative samples from most of them now. Been after this stuff for a long time now. I used to own a complete evolution of the underground Direct Market movement, but all those documents were destroyed into paper mache bricks in a warehouse flood in 1986]

 

Anyway, one can see the business evolving and unfolding before your eyes when all that data is combined into one narrative - as all the sides of a multi-facted coin come together as a blended view of what happened and why from many unique perspectives.

 

[side bar: Maybe one day i will sell a huge pile of comic books from my eBay store and web site in a short period of time and finally be able to sit down for six months to a year and finish & polish my comics business history book - one has family to consider before thinking of just doing research.]

 

ANC agreed to divest from aspects of their operation ultimatlely because the onslaught of Television had vastly eroded many circulations of so many major magazines much less comic magazines (as they were known to everyone in the industry back in its so-called "Golden" age. They saw the hand writing on the wall. They had almost a century of circulation data to follow national trends the new comers did not have privy access to.

 

 

TV killed so many radio shows as well - and movie theatres took a nose dive until they re-invented themselves also.

 

as a side bar: Comic Books killed off the pulps, but who is counting Survival of the Fittest ala Darwin concepts. and quite a few Classics Illustrated were sanitized from their extreme violence in the earlier incarnations due to public out cry. Gilberton modified his product and went outside the periodical distribution system until they were ultimately put out by Cliff's Notes.

 

Think what the internet has done to letters being mailed at the post office, which is why letter postage keeps accelerating now as the volume dwindles and i must use my fax machine all of maybe 3 or 4 times a year - we pay our bills online, eBay and PayPal, etc

 

That is what Television did to print and radio and theatre media for news and entertainment. I remember Lowel Thomas news reels in theatres - any one drawing a blank here?

 

and who killed off Vaudeville, any way?

 

 

 

[Robert Beerbohm]

and here is a side bar of an old email i sent to a discussion group some years ago which might pertain aspects of distribution. On 3/13/06 8:22 AM, "craig yoe" wrote:

 

> Yo, Matt!

> I've always wondered about the accuracy of these Captain Marvel numbers.

> It COULD of been some Fawcett publicist combining The Capt. Marvel, Captain

> Marvel Jr, Marvel Family, even Hoppy the Marvel Bunny stories. I DO think CM

> was incredibly popular, which is why DC tried and was successful in cutting

> his legs out from under him. Add this to your confusion: I heard CM was

> issued twice a month during his height of popularity. I have no evidence to

> substanciate any of this that I'm saying, though. SHAZAM!

> --Yoe

>

OK, I¹ll bite into this apple. I am getting ready to head out to a comicon

in Seattle, but will invest some time into trying to answer.

 

Capt Marvel was issued every two weeks at its height of popularity between

issue numbers 51 and 63 that is a fact. The 14 million number has to be a

combined number as the distributor data I have on hand indicates CM reached

a circ of 1.5 million an issue for a time.

 

I have been collecting distributor trade journals for some years now, having

a complete set of American News Trade Journal 1919-1957 which gives data on

Cupples & Leon in the 1920s, intro of Famous Funnies in 1934, etc, most

issues of Newsdealer which covers the independents beginning in 1946 up thru

1970 or so, plus issues from Fawcett and others

 

Super heroes were not the best selling USA comic books I fail to see why

scholars get hung up on this spandex concept as to what sold in America

 

In no particular order:

 

Bringing Up Father 1 2 3 sold over a million copies each back in 1919-1920

 

Boy Commandos #1 and #2 went over a million sold

 

Mutt & Jeff from AA, then DC, was selling over a million an issue

consistently

 

Superman #1 sold out 900,000 on 3 print runs; #2 sold out 1.2 million

 

Walt Disney¹s Comics & Stories hit upwards of 4 million an issue, being the

best selling American comic book of all time to me an undisputed fact,

with about 3/4 of this circ being subscription, non-news stand as it were

 

Looney Tunes was selling in excess of 3 million an issue

 

Howdy Doody¹s numbers hit 600,000 an issue

 

Tarzan, Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Little Lulu and other Dell mega-hits were

over a million sold per issue

 

In the early 1950s USA comics production did indeed approach 2 billion

printed, leading to a massive glut on the market place as well as a massive

outcry against the comic book in America very similar to the video game

outcry decades later. Statistics back then very clearly intoned that over

90% of all children were regular comic book readers and over 80% of all

adults regularly read at least the newspaper comic strips.

 

 

brought on by the Batman TV show by 1968 when Batman hit its popularity,

it was selling a million an issue for a short period of time (maybe a year)

 

- and the fall came around the time the Batman TV show when bi-weekly. All

the other publishers cranked up their volume in titles and print runs.

Marvel doubled in size in 1968, fer instance.

 

It was in the aftermath fall-out of this last glut that I entered the comic

book store business with Bud Plant and John Barrett in August 1972 when we

opened up the first Comics & Comix outlet on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley a few

blocks down from the UC-Berkeley campus. We called that first one The

Berkeley Comic Art Shop. In the space of one year we had 3 other stores in

San Francisco, San Jose and Sacramento.

 

The Direct Market was a response to affidavit return fraud with its

origins in the San Francisco Bay Area underground comix market cranking up

in 1968 and Phil Seuling introducing DC and Marvel comics into this system

in 1973.

 

There were many other titles which sold very well, over a million.

 

 

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

 

 

 

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[markseifert]

This is very interesting. I know some people have looked though Audit Bureau of Circulation data over the years, and I had the opportunity to look at a couple old books of published ABC data myself once.

 

But as you know, they list data by "unit", which in most cases combine several different titles from a publisher's line into a block. No way to get data for individual issue sales from these ABC books, at least the one's I've seen.

 

I've always wondered where some of the historical individual title/issue sales that you see cited here and there come from (the Superman #1 number you mention comes up often). I'd assumed that perhaps some publisher records were being unearthed from time to time.

 

But you're saying these trade journals contain individual title/issue data? I'd never known that! VERY interesting.

 

 

I have been collecting distributor trade journals for some years now, having

a complete set of American News Trade Journal 1919-1957 which gives data on

Cupples & Leon in the 1920s, intro of Famous Funnies in 1934, etc, most

issues of Newsdealer which covers the independents beginning in 1946 up thru

1970 or so, plus issues from Fawcett and others

[Robert Beerbohm]

There is not as much data re individual unit sales in the trade journals as one might wish for. But there is some, when records were set, etc. - plus hype from the publishers in ads and articles

 

The Superman #1 sales figures came directly from DC National archives back in the early 1970s - first print 500,000; 2nd print 250,000; 3rd print 150,000

 

plus the same source material provided specific sales figures on the first couple dozen Action Comics, of which i do not have handy right now, placed into a file folder i have to uncover again soon.

 

But to stay on the topic of this thread, i will repeat myself that i always thought it humorous:

 

1) DC is time lined from New Fun #1 onwards

 

2) Goodman is broken up into Timely, Atlas, Marvel

 

Both orgs used many different corporate identities albeit Goodman used many more than Donenfeld

 

 

 

This is very interesting. I know some people have looked though Audit Bureau of Circulation data over the years, and I had the opportunity to look at a couple old books of published ABC data myself once.

 

But as you know, they list data by "unit", which in most cases combine several different titles from a publisher's line into a block. No way to get data for individual issue sales from these ABC books, at least the one's I've seen.

 

I've always wondered where some of the historical individual title/issue sales that you see cited here and there come from (the Superman #1 number you mention comes up often). I'd assumed that perhaps some publisher records were being unearthed from time to time.

 

But you're saying these trade journals contain individual title/issue data? I'd never known that! VERY interesting.

 

 

I have been collecting distributor trade journals for some years now, having

a complete set of American News Trade Journal 1919-1957 which gives data on

Cupples & Leon in the 1920s, intro of Famous Funnies in 1934, etc, most

issues of Newsdealer which covers the independents beginning in 1946 up thru

1970 or so, plus issues from Fawcett and others