ATLAS COMICS LIBRARY Volume 4 War Comics #1

Forged in the crucible of the Korean War, and produced by veterans of the Second World War, this volume's eight issues present the brutality and grimness of armed combat by some of Atlas' most notable war artists and future Marvel Age stars: Gene Colan, Russ Heath, Joe Maneely, Dave Berg, Jay Scott Pike, Mike Sekowsky, et al. Propaganda abounds from the very first story, published in War Comics #1 in September 1950: "Peril in Korea," a primer explaining why the US joined the conflict. Other highlights include Colan's "The Chips are Down" and "Victory," Heath's "Alone" and "No Survivors," Maneely's "Stormy Weather," Henkel's "Total Destruction," and Berg's "The Infantry's War." There's also work here by Vern Henkel, Allen Bellman, Pete Morisi and Norman Steinberg. Originally a trial spun off from the publisher's "Men's Adventure" publications, in the nine years to follow Atlas went on to produce 533 comic book issues with war content, across 34 different titles. War Comics is where it all began: unseen in decades, scanned from the original books, restored and packaged as one large, beautiful hardcover volume. Excellent reproduction; Fantagraphics is very careful to present these with the utmost restoration work. As much as we do well with PS Artbooks, for example, reproduction in those can sometimes be disappointing. Here Fantagraphics gives each page the time and attention to get the best-looking reproduction possible, and it shows. A nice long illustrated introduction  begins with the Timely World War II comics, pulp and men's magazines, taking us title by title into what would evolve into a domination of the war comics genre in the early 1950s. By the end of the 1950s, Timely/Atlas would have published more than 500 issues and dozens of titles in this one genre, war stories. Wonderful reproductions of rare covers of comics, pulps, men’s magazines (Stag, etc) and the legendary Humorama line of men’s risque cartoon titles! Atlas Historian Dr. Michael J. Vassallo once again gives us a great foundation to appreciate these collected stories in his informative and beautifully illustrated essay.