They weren't called 'Atlas' because they held up well.

I've been reading a lot of 1950s Atlas Comics from the war/spy genres recently and have begun to notice some peculiar recurring ideas. Perhaps it shouldn't surprise me that much to find similar ideas repeated again and again in the comics, but these four tropes were a bit surprising.

Trope the first: Women Must Die!

This one came specifically from reading a bunch of issues of Kent Blake of the Secret Service back-to-back. Kent Blake's stories were usually set in Washington DC but would send him all over the world to ferret out communist spies. Sometimes the stories were established as a mystery to make the reader guess which suspect might be a commie. Frequently, the spies would die in the climax.

What's amazing about the Kent Blake series is how often the spies turn out to be woman and that the series almost always kills them. If the spy is a man, he might die or he might be captured. If the spy is a woman, statistically she is almost certain to die (so far I've read only one story where the woman spy is taken alive). It's not that the character of Kent has a thirst for women's blood - they tend to fall off roofs or be murdered by their male associates. There was something which convinced the Kent Blake creators that women were soft on communism and therefore deserving of death.

But even the women on Kent's side tend to be picked off, be they Iranian women or Korean women, simply associating with Kent is a good way for women to enter an early grave. In one story, Kent has a girlfriend named Gale who invites him her to home for a vacation (which naturally leads to a "find the commie" plot that ends with a woman spy dying). Gale wants to marry Kent; that's enough to make Kent want to get as far away from her as he can. Totaled up, Kent Blake has a pretty strong misogynistic streak within it. It makes you wonder if Mickey Spillane were still writing for Marvel in those days.

Trope the second: Peace Is Hell!

Now and then a character in a war comic might wistfully wonder, "can't we give peace a chance?" The plot will almost always demand, no, you cannot. There are some stories set during the Korean War where communist soldiers realize "the American way" is superior and will defect to the other side (usually executing a few of their fellow commies to prove themselves), but usually when a soldier in one of these stories thinks something outrageous like "communists are people too," the story will go out of its way to prove him wrong, wrong, wrong by having the communists commit terrible atrocities, disobey the rules of war and prey upon the soldier's weak-minded egalitarianism. By the climax, the peace-minded soldier will have learned his lesson (the only good red is a dead red) and will probably die in a suicidal strike against the communists.

Trope the third: We Have Met the Enemy!

It would be wrong to think the Atlas Comics glorified war. I mean, they did, but some of the time - particularly pre-Code - they told a number of "war is hell" stories where good men die senseless deaths, sometimes killed by munitions dropped by their own side. Still, you almost never saw a story where the United States Army were the bad guys...

...Unless you count stories set during the US Civil War. The one time where it is acceptable to depict the United States as an unjust aggressor battling a noble people? That would be the time they had to fight their own rebellious citizens, y'know, the ones who believed in racial superiority and the principle of owning other men as property; that never comes up in the Atlas stories, as you can well imagine. Virtually every Civil War story is some variant on "Lost Cause" hogwash and ends up taking the centrist position of, "gosh, there were very good people on both sides." There's something very unsettling about the one scenario where the US Army are allowed to be the bad guys is when they were battling a tyrannical slave state.

Trope the fourth: Yellow Fever!

Atlas Comics had a whole cottage industry of war comic book features starring a pair of vitriolic best friends, two manly men who would always be bustin' each other's balls while going on consequence-free adventures in the middle of a war zone. That is, they were basically rip-offs of the characters Flagg & Quirt from the film What Price Glory? and were often written by Hank Chapman.

Within those stories there were a number of notable female villains - Asian women often dressed in military garb (but just as often showing off their cleavage) whom our heroes would spar with time and again, never killing them despite their deadly possibilities. They were essentially ersatz Dragon Lady copies. Some of these ladies appeared so frequently they would fight the heroes in more than one story per issue!

Combat Kelly and Cookie Novak had Yalu River Rosie, the Panther Lady, Muktong Molly and Korea Katie; Battle Brady and Socko Swenski had General Olga; Iron Mike McGraw and Gunny Gorski had Chee; Battleship Burke and Salty Smith had Hungnam Hannah (I commented about her before). That's everyone I've found so far. Obviously there was a bit of the ol' fashioned western interest in Orientalism, particularly on the exoticism side. It also seemed to provide a means to belittle the USA's communist adversaries: "Hey, dem commie dames jus' wanna tough 'Murican guy tah put 'em in der place."