Atlas Publications
Atlas logo as used on its comic books in 1950
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| Proprietary company | |
| Industry | Publishing |
| Genre |
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| Founded | 1947 |
| Founders | |
| Defunct | 1958 |
| Headquarters | 282 Queen's Parade, Clifton Hill, Victoria, Australia |
Atlas Publications was an Australian publishing company which operated from 1948 until 1958 and was based in Clifton Hill, a suburb of Melbourne. It published magazines and popular fiction, and the genre for which it was best known, adventure comics. It had no relation to the American company Atlas Comics which was active in the same period.
The company was founded in 1947 by Jack Bellew and George Warnecke, two former journalists on the The Daily Telegraph, and Clive Turnbull, who at the time was a staff writer and art critic for the Melbourne-based Herald. The company was managed by Peter Ryan, who characterised the founders as "a small syndicate of well-off Melbourne lefty journalists". Warnecke himself would later describe the venture to friends as an "Intelligent Young Man's Guide to Capitalism".
The company achieved a major success with its 1948 series Captain Atom drawn by Arthur Mather and written largely by Jack Bellew under the pen name "John Welles". Captain Atom (no relation to the later American superhero Captain Atom) was one of the few original Australian comic heroes to have his own merchandising and fan club. The comic was originally published entirely in colour, but Atlas followed their chief rival, K.G. Murray, and switched to black and white two years later when the cost of colour printing became prohibitive. Despite the switch to black and white, the Captain Atom series remained successful, running to 64 issues over the next six years. The majority of Atlas's comics publications were reprints of British or American comic strips or Australian versions of them, such as Sergeant Pat of the Radio Patrol (based on two characters of the American strip Radio Patrol) and Brenda Starr with illustrations by Yaroslav Horak, who like Arthur Mather and Andrea Bresciani became a regular artist for Atlas. However, Atlas was best known for its home-grown Australian comics—in addition to Captain Atom, it published Keith Chatto's The Lone Wolf and Terry Trowell's Grey Domino.
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