The company was founded in 1947 by Jack Bellew and George Warnecke, two former journalists at The Daily Telegraph, and Clive Turnbull, who at the time was a staff writer and art critic for the Melbourne-based Herald.

[1][2][3] 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".

[4][5] 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[a] and Terry Trowell's Grey Domino.

Atlas's other publications included Miss Young Romance comics, Heart-Throb photo novels, novelettes of Western stories, a racing guide, and the men's magazines Zowie, Fun and Frolic.