DURING THE 1950s , Marty Goodman's Marvel Comics were published under the Atlas trademark, though this was in reality the name of Goodman's own distribution company. During this time, he also put out a wide range of detective, movie and men's magazines, and considered the comics as no more than a mildly lucrative sideline, leaving most of the day-to-day decisions to his nephew-by-marriage and editor, Stan Lee. It's fairly well-documented that Goodman was never a creative thinker, and mostly ordered Stan Lee to follow whatever trend seemed to be the most popular at the time. With the waning of the wartime superhero craze, Goodman wound down publication of his costumed characters, and began to look for other subjects for his line of comic books. When his former employees Joe Simon and Jack Kirby had a massive success with Young Romance in 1947, Goodman instructed Stan Lee to come up with some romance books and was soon publishing My Romance . The first issue of Joe Simo...
AS THE DAYS of Marty Goodman's Atlas Comics drew to a close in the late 1950s, the publisher was casting around for the Next Big Thing. Locked in to a draconian distribution contract with arch rivals DC Comics, Goodman was limited to a tight eight titles per month and if he needed to launch a new title, he was forced to cancel an existing one. So, feeling that mystery and science fiction was the coming trend Goodman decided to launch three new comics to complement the existing Journey into Mystery, World of Fantasy and Strange Tales titles. The new books were Strange Worlds , beginning in December 1958 and replacing the cancelled Navy Combat , and Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish , both debuting in January 1959, replacing the cancelled Homer the Happy Ghost and Miss America . Journey into Mystery and Strange Tales had been around since the twilight of the Golden Age and changed in content according to Martin Goodman's take on his customers' tastes. So they bega...