(W) Joe Maneely, Gene Colan, Russ Heath (A) Joe Maneely, Gene Colan, Russ Heath (CA) Carl Burgos, Sol Brodsky 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 comics stars including Gene Colan, Russ Heath, Joe Maneely, Dave Berg, Jay Scott Pike, Mike Sekowsky, Vern Henkel, Allen Bellman, Pete Morisi and Norman Steinberg.Propaganda abounds from the very first story, published in War Comics #1 in September 1950: Peril in Korea, a primer explaining why the USA 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.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, sca

(W) Joe Maneely, Gene Colan (A) Joe Maneely, Gene Colan (CA) Joe Maneely Before focusing on tales of justice via superheroes under the Marvel banner, the publisher covered groundlevel crime across a range of comics titles and truecrime magazines. Under the Timely imprint from 1947, and Atlas from 1951, up to eleven graphic series including Justice Comics, Official True Crime Cases, AllTrue Crime, Crime Cases, Crime Can't Win, Crime Must Lose, and Crime Exposed all muscled each other and competitors for space on the newsstands.For the first crimethemed volume in Fantagraphics' ongoing project to restore and resurrect preMarvel pulp classics, the Atlas Library has selected a book that debuted as the genre peaked, just before a Senate hearing and the institution of the Comics Code banned the use of the word Crime from even appearing in a comic's title. Escaping that fate, Police Action had a sevenissue run of violent and noirish morality plays, pitting the officers of the law against the forces of urban malevolence, and was produced by the cream of the Atlas freelance roster, including