The Fantagraphics Atlas Comics Library is the first attempt to publish a carefully curated line of Atlas titles. Our first volume, Adventures Into Terror, includes a treasure trove of stories drawn by many of the most stylistically accomplished artists of the Golden Age including George Tuska, Carl Burgos, Mike Sekowsky, Joe Maneely, and Joe Sinnott...

The enduring cultural phenomenon of comic book heroes was invented in the late 1930s by a talented and hungry group of artists and writers barely out of their teens, flying by the seat of their pants to create something new, exciting, and above all profitable. The iconography and mythology they created flourishes to this day in comic books, video, movies, fine art, advertising, and practically all other media. Supermen! collects the best and the brightest of this first generation, including Jack Cole, Will Eisner, Bill Everett, Lou Fine, Fletcher Hanks, Jack Kirby, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and Basil Wolverton. If the reader is expecting to find an All-American group of altruistic do-gooders, he in for quite a jolt. As Jonathan Lethem writes in his Foreword, “A collection like Supermen! works like a reverse-neutron bomb to assumptions about the birth of the superhero image: it tears down the orderly structures of theory and history and leaves the figures standing in full view, staring back at us in all their defiant disorienting particularity, their blazing strangeness.” Beautifully designed and produced in full color, Supermen! contains twenty full-length stories, ten full-sized covers, a generous selection of vintage promotional ads, and comprehensive end notations by editor Greg Sadowski, making it indispensable to anyone interested in the origins of superheroes and the history of the comic book form.

Did you ever wonder how to stop brooding if your ears are protruding? Or how to indulge yourself and snore without being a bore? Or for the masochists among you, how to sit on a tack? Or for the narcissists, how to contemplate the back of your pate? Or something as simple as how to get out of bed gracefully? Or something a bit more challenging like how to boot a fly off your snoot? Or, if you’re the violent type, what’s the best way to kick someone in the teeth? Or, for those striving for greater refinement, how to be particular and is perpendicular? If these conundrums have perplexed and mystified you, the remedy is at hand: cartooning genius Basil Wolverton’s “Culture Corner,” an indispensable guide to demystifying life’s most worrisome and disconcerting social quandaries.

Powerhouse Pepper debuted in the first issue of JOKER Comics in April of 1942, and 30 of the next 31 issues featured stories in which Powerhouse appeared, to enough acclaim by fans and readers that the 1st issue of Powerhouse Pepper Comics appeared less than a year later, in 1943. Rather than let Wolverton's brilliance shine from the cover, Timely's editors (Stan Lee among them) covered the issue with a too-generic rendering of the character, which may have dissuaded some of Powerhouse's fans from picking up this seminal issue. Whatever the reason, and despite the stellar work in that first issue, another FIVE YEARS went by before a second issue appeared, with a new logo and the title shortened to simply POWERHOUSE PEPPER #2. This second issue quite correctly featured an illustration by Wolverton himself, with Powerhouse doing the sort of thing he does best, in this instance snapping a table in half with his bare hands...

This volume continues Sadowski’s biography of the famed Mad cartoonist. It includes scores of letters between Wolverton and his editors and publishers and excerpts from his personal diaries, providing documentary insight not only into Wolverton’s day-to-day life and career, but also the inner workings of the early comic book industry. It is also chock full of Wolverton’s comics stories from this period, including 17 science-fiction and horror tales fully restored and never before collected in a single volume.

Cartoonist Basil Wolverton was known for his grotesque drawings, fantastically odd creatures, spaghetti-like hair, smoothly sculpted caricatures and insanely detailed crosshatching. His career in the golden age of comic books lasted from 1938 until 1952, after which his illustrations and caricatures extended into such publications as Life, Pageant and MAD magazines. Stylistically, he has been regarded as one of the spiritual grandfathers of underground and alternative comix. Less well known and understood is his work for the Worldwide Church of God, headed until 1986 by radio evangelist Herbert Armstrong. From 1953 through 1974, Wolverton, a deeply religious man, was commissioned and later employed by the church to write and illustrate a narrative of the Old Testament (including over 550 illustrations), some 20 apocalyptic illustrations inspired by the Book of Revelations, and dozens of cartoons and humorous illustrations for various Worldwide Church publications.

274-Pages! Basil Wolverton is one of the greatest, most idiosyncratic talents in comic book history. Though he is best known for his humorous grotesqueries in MAD magazine, it is his science-fiction character Spacehawk that Wolverton fans have most often demanded be collected. The wait is over, as Spacehawk features every story from Spacehawk's intergalactic debut in 1940 to his final, Nazi-crushing adventure in 1942. Spacehawk is the closest thing to a colorfully-costumed, conventional action hero Wolverton ever created, yet the strip is infused with Wolverton's quintessential weirdness: controlled, organic artwork of strangely repulsive aliens and monsters and bizarre planets, and stories of gruesome retribution that bring to mind Wolverton's peer, Fletcher Hanks. Spacehawk had no secret identity, no fixed base of operations beyond his spaceship, and no sidekicks or love interests. He had but one mission in life: to protect the innocent throughout the Solar System, and to punish the guilty. He was a dark -- yet much more visually playful -- counterpart to Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Spacehawk also includes the character's final and rarely-seen Earthbound adventures. As the U.S. became involved in World War II, Spacehawk returned to 20th Century America to join the United States' efforts in defeating fascism, which he does by patrolling the Earth's stratosphere, looking for wrongdoing. Named "Best Superhero Comic Originally Published Much, Much Earlier Than 2012" by ComicsAlliance.

It is currently unknown where the numbering for Volume 2 is continued from. Numbering for Volume 2 is continued in Honeymoon #41.

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Comedy Comics was an anthology published during the 1940's, beginning with #9 (the first eight issues were published in the superhero title Daring Mystery Comics), by its sixth issue the comic began to feature Super Rabbit (who starred in several 1940's Timely Comics). As World War II was going on at the time, he would of course occasionally defeat Nazis although he would also stop regular criminals. After holding onto the title for twenty issues (and four years), with #34, Margie became the feature and with #35 the series changed its name to reflect this, becoming Margie Comics.

Reprinting four more of Wolverton's classic tales of horror and suspense, including: "Gateway to Horror" and "They Crawl by Night"!

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A superhero anthology running 17 issues cover-dated August 1941 to Fall 1945, it showcased early work by industry legends Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, and famed cartoonist Basil Wolverton, introduced the Whizzer and other characters, and for much of its run starred Captain America during that long-running character's World War II height of popularity.

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