Atlas Comics Library #5
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeThis volume marks the first time the complete run of Atlas Comics' Police Action has been reprinted, making available a title that existed precisely at the fault line of the pre-Code era: it debuted just as the Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency and the subsequent Comics Code Authority permanently reshaped what American crime comics could say and show. By collecting the full seven-issue run alongside the post-Code one-shot Police Badge #479, the volume functions as a before-and-after document, illustrating in concrete storytelling terms how the CCA's ban on the very word 'Crime' in a comic's title forced publishers to retool the entire genre's tone and content. The book also spotlights a cluster of Golden Age artists — most prominently Joe Maneely and the early Gene Colan — who would go on to define the look of Marvel Comics in the Silver Age, giving readers a rare chance to trace those careers back to their pre-superhero roots. As the first crime-genre entry in the Fantagraphics Atlas Comics Library, it broadens the archival project's scope beyond horror and war, demonstrating that the publisher running eleven simultaneous crime titles under the Timely and Atlas imprints was not a footnote but a dominant force in mid-century genre publishing.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
The original Police Action ran for seven issues, all published in 1954, emerging at the peak of the crime-comics boom when the Atlas imprint was simultaneously sustaining up to eleven separate crime and true-crime graphic series competing fiercely for newsstand space. The series was assembled from Atlas's deep pool of freelance talent during the years before the Comics Code Authority, implemented in September 1954, ended the market for that kind of unvarnished, violent storytelling. Fantagraphics announced the broader Atlas Comics Library project in April 2023 as a formal collaboration with Marvel, with series editor Dr. Michael J. Vassallo — a noted historian of the Timely and Atlas periods who has also contributed to over twenty Marvel Masterworks volumes and the Taschen 75 Years of Marvel book — overseeing restoration and historical annotation across the entire line. Volume 5 was published on April 1, 2025, as a full-color hardcover running approximately 254 pages, with pages slightly larger than the original comics to optimize the restored artwork.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Collects all seven issues of Police Action (1954) #1–7, plus the post-Code one-shot Police Badge #479 #1 — the first time any of this material has been collected in a modern archival edition.
- Police Action ran from January to November 1954, with four comic stories and a two-page text story per issue, and was discontinued after the Comics Code Authority banned the word 'Crime' from comic titles and tightened genre content.
- Principal artists include Joe Maneely, Gene Colan, Robert Q. Sale, Bob Powell, Art Peddy, Mort Lawrence, Werner Roth, and Don Heck — many of whom would become central to Marvel's Silver Age superhero line.
- Joe Maneely, one of the volume's primary contributors, was Stan Lee's most prized Atlas-era artist; Lee later said he believed Maneely would have been 'the next Jack Kirby.' Maneely died in a commuter-train accident in June 1958 at age 32.
- Bob Powell, another contributor, was a veteran of the Eisner/Iger studio who co-wrote the first 'Blackhawk' story and later penciled the art for Topps' Mars Attacks trading card series.
- The inclusion of Police Badge #479 serves a deliberate editorial purpose: the editor placed it here specifically so that this post-Code, toned-down companion title would have at least one reprint opportunity, since no future standalone collection was anticipated.
- The volume is the first crime-genre entry in the Fantagraphics Atlas Comics Library, which spans horror (Adventures Into Terror), mythology/horror (Venus), science fiction (In the Days of the Rockets!), and war (War Comics Vol. 1) across its first five volumes.
- Series editor Dr. Michael J. Vassallo provides a historical introduction contextualizing the crime-comics boom, the Senate hearings, and Atlas's place in the competitive newsstand landscape of the early 1950s.
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