Before I forget, I wanted to recommend…well, any issue of Roy Thomas's magazine of comic book history, Alter Ego, but especially the one I just received. Dr. Michael J. Vassallo is a dentist by day, and the world's foremost authority on Atlas Comics by night. (For the uninformed: Before Marvel Comics was Marvel Comics, the company went by many names but most folks referred to it as Timely Comics in the forties and Atlas in the fifties.) For this issue of Alter Ego, Dr. Michael has assembled an outstanding history of the career of Joe Maneely, a great and amazingly-prolific artist who worked tirelessly for Atlas for many years, much to the delight of editor Stan Lee. Stan has called Maneely his favorite illustrator of the time and cited him, rightly, as a guy who could draw anything: super-heroes, war, westerns, funny duck comics, you-name-it. Maneely was very fast and very good, and comic historians have been known to speculate — as Vassallo does in this article — on what might have happened, had Maneely not perished in a grisly train accident in 1958 at age 32.
Had that not happened, he would presumably have been working for Stan in the early sixties when Jack Kirby was also there and they began reintroducing and reinventing the super-hero comic with The Fantastic Four. In an upcoming issue of The Jack Kirby Collector, I'll add in my speculations for whatever they're worth. But right now, I want to commend this Alter Ego to you. It's really a terrific, well-researched article — one of many that have turned up in that magazine.