Horror! War! Romance!

Throughout the fifties and sixties, Marvel wasn’t publishing superhero comic books. Well, for a lot of that, they weren’t even called Marvel Comics. But Atlas Comics published a series of things.

They published horror comics. They published war comics. They published Western comics. They published romance comics. They published giant monster comics. And when they returned to making superhero comics, they brought all of that with them. So Marvel’s new brand of superhero comics felt like nothing anyone had ever seen before. Their heroes went through scientific origins with ironic consequences like horror characters.

They fought foreign spies and tanks like war heroes. They dated and broke up like romance stars. Seriously, if you read Amazing Fantasy #15, it doesn’t feel like a hero origin; it feels like an old EC horror comic . That monster on the cover of Fantastic Four #1? That thing is a classic Kirby Monster, through and through. And you know who else is a Kirby monster? The Thing. Even Marvel’s heroes were swirled with other genres.

It’s what’s kept them going to this day.