‘Adventures Into Terror’

Long before the “Marvel Comics Universe” was an ink stain on Jack Kirby’s drawing board, before superheroes like Spider-Man, The Avengers, and The Fantastic Four captured the hearts and imaginations of readers across the U.S. and in Great Britain, there was Atlas Comics. Formed in 1951 from the remnants of Martin Goodman’s Timely Comics – which published popular titles like Captain America along with pulp magazines and novels – Atlas provided a change in direction for the publisher when readers lost interest in superheroes. Expanding the styles of titles he published, Goodman’s crew began cranking out comics in the horror, crime, Western, and romance genres as well as Bible stories.

The big money in the early 1950s (made one thin dime at a time!) was in horror comics. Pulp publishers of the era were typically autocratic impresarios like Goodman, William Gaines of EC Comics, or John Santangelo of Charlton Publications, and they often merged creativity and commerce in pursuit of trends they could exploit. Aficionados of the genre appreciated Atlas. The company published more horror comics than anybody else in the industry, putting eight to twelve different comics titles on the newsstand shelves and spinner racks monthly. EC Comics led the field in creativity, but Atlas titles dominated the market through sheer volume. Edited by notable comics historian Dr. Michael J. Vassallo, The Atlas Comics Library No. 1: Adventures Into Terror, Vol. 1 is the first volume in publisher Fantagraphics’ efforts to document these seldom-reprinted comics from Atlas. 

Adventures Into Terror, Vol. 1 presents the first eight issues of the popular horror comic, published in 1950 and ‘51, with each issue scanned directly from the best possible version of the published comic and restored by archivist Allan Harvey. This first volume includes artwork by such ‘Golden Age of Comics’ legends as George Tuska, Carl Burgos, Harry Lazarus, and Joe Maneely. The writers are generally undocumented, providing an enigma for rabid collectors to sink their teeth into in trying to discover the creative provenance of each story, and the Atlas Tales website provides scant information, citing Hank Chapman as the scribe on many stories featured in these eight issues.  

From a pure artistic perspective, Adventures Into Terror is, in a word, uneven. Comics publishers in the 1950s more-or-less worked an “assembly line” process, with stories assigned to artists who penciled the story before handing it off to an inker who would flesh out the details before lobbing the ball over to the letterer, who would add in the words and toss it to the production department to prep for printing on the cheapest paper possible. Many of the artists represented in this collection of Adventures Into Terror were uninspired journeymen delivering speed and efficiency rather than creative visuals that would tantalize (or terrorize) the reader’s eyes and psyche. While some of the stories transcend the mundane, mediocre art often hampers them; but in other cases, sublime creativity salvages an otherwise hackneyed story. 

One of the biggest reasons why EC Comics was the leader of the pack in the 1950s horror comics genre was due to the efforts of skilled visual storytellers like Jack Kamen, Johnny Craig, and Wally Wood, among others, artists who infused the stories in rags like Tales From the Crypt or The Vault of Horror with emotion and nuance that complimented Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman’s imaginative writing. Atlas had few creators who could match up to the competition, and lost many a cheap thrill because of it. Not to say that it’s all bad–future Marvel Comics superstar Gene Colan (Blade, Daredevil), for example, delivers a moody, provocative werewolf story in “House of Horror,” which offers a twist on the hairy old lycanthrope trope. Colan’s terrific art for “The Clock Strikes” provides necessary suspense to an edgy psychological tale. 

Basil Wolverton, the master of grotesque and bizarre illustration, is best known for his contributions to EC’s Mad magazine. His lone story here – “Where Monsters Dwell” – brilliantly mixes monsters and science-fiction, thereby landing squarely in the artist’s wheelhouse. Joe Sinnot, who put his pencil to paper for a stunning number of horror, science fiction, Western, and fantasy tales for Atlas and, later, Marvel, is best known in fanboy circles as Jack Kirby’s inker on comics like The Fantastic Four and Thor. His “The Ones Who Laugh” is arguably not his best work, but it provides a mundane story with energy and ambiance nevertheless. Russ Heath’s “The Man Who Was Death” is a taut, entertaining suspense story, but his two-part “Brain” tales are delightfully over-the-top with eerie imagery certain to thrill the teenage (or, ahem…middle-aged) reader.

Many of the plotlines in Adventures Into Terror may seem tired or passé by modern standards, but the writers’ and artists’ portrayals of werewolves and vampires helped standardize these myths for generations to follow, while the thrills and chills provided by the more psychological- and fear-driven stories had a profound influence on horror cinema of the 1970s and ‘80s. Sadly, the party wouldn’t last, and Adventures Into Terror published only 31 issues over roughly four years before the ‘Sturm und Drang’ created by notorious pop-psychologist Dr. Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent created a parental moral panic during the mid-1950s. 

Wertham testified before a grandstanding Congress that comic books – especially the sort of horror and crime stories cranked out by Atlas and EC – were the leading cause of juvenile delinquency. The uproar caused the industry to self (over)regulate with the creation of the Comics Code Authority that subsequently banned shaggy dog stories or tales of bloodsuckers and zombies for the next two decades. These angry cultural winds all but bankrupted Gaines and EC Comics, which clung to the life preserver provided by Kurtzman’s popular Mad, which evolved from a comic into a magazine overnight and, thus, afforded greater First Amendment protection. By the end of the decade, Goodman had pivoted from his previously best-selling horror and crime comics back to superheroes, changed the company name from Atlas to Marvel and the rest, as they say, is history.   

As the first book from Fantagraphics in what will be a multi-volume documentation of Atlas Comics, Adventures Into Terror will appeal to the hardcore horror comics fan, or those who collect pre-Comics Code publications for their pulpy, perverse storytelling. As Adventures Into Terror rolled into 1952 and ’53, the title improved in both writing and art, and future volumes feature such fanboy fave artists as Bill Everett, John Romita, and Matt Fox. There’s a veritable goldmine awaiting in the Atlas vaults for collectors of vintage comics, including crime, Western, and combat titles, most of which haven’t been available for decades. For readers fascinated by comics published in those uncertain years between the two dominant superhero eras, Adventures Into Terror provides the best reproductions of these long-lost comics, preserving the history of this important and influential age of pop culture. 

Check out the Fantagraphics website for more info on Adventures Into Terror.