[5] He began his comic book career freelancing for Street & Smith in 1948, drawing such features as "Butterfingers", "Django Jinks, Ghost Chaser", "Dr. Savant", "Mario Nette", "Nick Carter", "Public Defender", "Roger Kilgore", "Supersnipe", and "Ulysses Q.

His earliest known credits are that company's Top Secrets #4 (Aug. 1948), for which he penciled and inked the eight-page crime fiction story "The Ragged Stranger"; and Red Dragon #4 (Aug. 1948), for which he drew the eight-page story "Death by the Sword" and the one-page featurette "Tao's Small Sword Box", both starring the hero Tao Anwar.

[6] Other nascent work includes the seven-page story "Washington's Scout" in Hillman Periodicals' Airboy Comics vol.

[5] With artist Peggy Zangerle and Hussian classmate George Ward — an artist for periodicals including the Philadelphia Bulletin and the New York Daily News and a 1950s assistant on Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo — Maneely formed an art studio at Philadelphia's Flo-Mar Building, at 3160 Kensington Avenue, Room 501.

[9][10] With speed to match his style,[2][11] he became a favorite of editor-in-chief Stan Lee,[12] who assigned Maneely covers and stories throughout virtually the entire range of Atlas comics.

With superheroes experiencing a lull in popularity, Maneely drew Westerns, war, horror, humor, romance, science fiction, spy, crime, and even period-adventure stories — that last most notably with the medieval series Black Knight, co-created by Maneely and writer and editor-in-chief Lee,[3] and first reprinted in 1960s Marvel Comics at the behest of editor Roy Thomas, who as a teen had "devoured the Black Knight comic, and became an immediate fan.

"[18] Maneely's distinctive style, wrote historian Vassallo, was, "Crisp, uniquely inked, busy, and action oriented.

"[19] By 1955, "Maneely's inking had stylized itself to a precision 'etching' effect, and he would enter a fruitful year that would see him turn out his most diverse and prolific work.

Shortly afterward, Martin Goodman stopped distributing his own titles and switched to American News Company, which soon closed, temporarily leaving Atlas without a distributor and resulting in all staff, other than Lee, being fired.

[21] Maneely continued to work with Lee on the Chicago Sun-Times-syndicated comic strip Mrs. Lyons' Cubs, which debuted in newspapers February 10, 1958.

[6] Maneely, additionally, drew a four-page comic about Social Security for the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, "John's First Job" (1956),[23] and another for the same agency, "A Farm and a Family.

"[24] On the night of his death, "past midnight of what was early Sunday morning," June 7, 1958, Maneely had dined hours earlier with fellow laid-off Atlas colleagues, including George Ward and John Severin, in Manhattan.

[26] Fellow Atlas artist Stan Goldberg recalled that on the night of Maneely's death, ... Joe [told] me that he'd been in the city the week before and had lost his glasses.