Charles Atlas: How Angelo Siciliano Sold Dynamic Tension in Comic Strips

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Angelo Siciliano was born in Acri, Italy, in October 1892 and arrived in Brooklyn in 1904, where he worked as a leather worker. By his own account he was a 97-pound weakling who had sand kicked in his face. Unable to afford the YMCA, he watched people exercise through its windows, questioned the strongmen at Coney Island, and read Physical Culture magazine. He later claimed he discovered his method watching a lion at the zoo pit one muscle against another, though his routines resembled those of contemporaries such as Bernarr Macfadden and Earle Liederman. In 1921 Macfadden called him America's most handsome man, and in 1922 he was named America's most perfectly developed man at Madison Square Garden. That year, at 30, he legally changed his name to Charles Atlas after a friend compared him to a statue of the Titan on a Coney Island hotel.

Atlas modeled for sculptors and launched a mail-order course in November 1922 with Frederick Tilney, a British homeopathic physician. In 1929 Tilney sold his half to advertising executive Charles P. Roman, who coined the term dynamic tension and built the comic strip ads of the 1930s, in which a skinny man named Mac, Joe or Jack loses his girl to a bully and returns transformed. The hosts link the ads' appeal to the Great Depression's crisis of masculinity. Atlas died of a heart attack in Long Beach, New York, on Christmas Eve 1972 at age 80.

• His physique served as the model for the Alexander Hamilton statue at the U.S. Treasury and the Washington at Peace sculpture on the Washington Square Arch.
• The course had twelve lessons plus a perpetual final lesson, with personal letters addressing each reader as a friend.
• Boxers Max Baer, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano and sprinter Allan Wells used the method.
• David Prowse, who played Darth Vader's physical role in the original Star Wars films, also took the course.
• When the company sued over parodies, courts treated the sand-kicking story as a shared cultural trope protected for parody.