Well, now that I've proposed it, anyone willing to do a 50s Atlas retrospective? I doubt anyone has a complete collection of titles, but reviewing the ones that may have would still be an interesting topic about Marvel's "lost decade".

I'd be interested in reading an 1950s Atlas thread: I know almost nothing about Atlas comics (and BTW, in case anyone's wondering, had no opinion on or even knew there was any controversy over what Stan Lee wrote in the Atlas days), apart from whatever reprints I might have read in various Marvel anthology series in the 1960s and 70s.

The Atlas title I'm really curious about is Venus (and I know it's been reprinted) because of the weird twists and turns it took and some wildly bizarre covers.

Not for the first time and surely not for the last, I feel like the contents of this entire thread would make for a fascinating Netflix documentary along the lines of "The Toys That Made Us."

What an incredible base of comics related historical knowledge we have here. I remain impressed.

The Comics that Made Us MAD!!!

And they could of course also cover MAD Magazine.

First I was talking about how Challengers sold in the 50s, during and right after Kirby left. It was a better seller at that time than the JLA became. I was talking about how the superheroes sold all the way up to 61 and the introduction of the FF.
What i find incredulous is that Goodman would decide to upend his entire comics line because DC had a mid level selling book. "Oh look, DC has a new book selling 40% of what Superman does, let's model our line on that!"
Your last sentence. But they didn't. They still bought all the Superman titles and Batman more. JLA sold fine, but how was that such a big hit to make Goodman shake up everything? And why was their first book modeled after Challengers and then only have individual hero books for 2 years and then not do a JLA type book with the Avengers in 63?

Once again, it wasn't a mid-level selling book. It was the 13th best selling book in all of comics. The only non-DC comics that sold more were Uncle Scrooge, Tarzan, Archie, and Turok. The only DC books that outsold it were the Superman family books and Batman. It sold the same amount of copies as Detective Comics. The difference between JLA and the nation's other best selling books? It was a team book. 

Even if Kirby came to Goodman with the greatest pitch in the history of the world for The Fantastic Four, Goodman was still the one who had to give the OK and there's no evidence to discredit the story that Goodman based his decision on the JLA sales. The order of events may have been different from how they're historically presented, but even if Kirby was the driving force behind everything, it didn't happen in a bubble. 

If we compare 1960 sales figures to 1961, you can see that there are a lot more non-superhero books in the top 20, mostly Dell books. What happened in 1961 is that Dell misread the market and raised their cover price to 15 cents when everyone else went to 12 cents. That was one of the pivotal points in the super-hero take over. It's hard to believe that Goodman, however competent you believe he was, didn't notice a trend in the market. As far as  I recall, he wanted a team book with the old Timely characters but Stan and Kirby went a different route. 

My point about the kids buying JLA was as an alternative to buying Green Lantern, Flash, Wonder Woman, and whoever else had a solo book at the time.