Suicide Squad 44, cover date August 1990, introduced to the mainstream universe The Atom (Adam Cray), Betty Harkness, Ian Harkness, Mick Wentworth, and Tom Harkness. They were created by John Ostrander, David DeVries, and Luke McDonnell. ("Grave Matters" Suicide Squad 44, DC Comic Event)
Showcase #34 is the first appearance of the Silver Age Atom. We're not... we're not going back to the other Aquaman stories. You're not missing much. It's just three issues of fish monsters. Not even cool or interesting fish monsters, just... we're not going back! Welcome to the Gutters!
The Silver Age Atom is perhaps the archetypal shrinking hero, but not the first. The first shrinking hero that I'm aware of was Quality Comics' Doll Man, created in 1939, who was later purchased by DC comics so they get to claim him anyway. The golden age Atom was created in 1940, a full two years before Enrico Fermi created the first atomic reactor, and five years before they stuffed a big bomb full of atoms and lit the whole thing on fire.
The golden age Atom had barely any resemblance to his more famous descendant. Al Pratt was a 98-pound, 5'1" certified manlet, who always got picked on by the bigger kids and couldn't get a date. One day, a chance encounter with a down-on-his-luck boxing trainer leads to him getting the full Charles Atlas treatment. He was called "The Atom" because he was small but powerful, but he did not actually have any powers, at first. Once people realized how cool and not at all problematic atomic weapons could be, he began to exhibit genuine superhuman strength.
Most of the DC's golden age history is murky, crudely illustrated, and has been heavily retconned, so we won't go into the details because that won't matter in a couple decades! Al Pratt has nothing to do with the Silver Age Atom because they exist in completely different universes. One thing I do want to mention is that Al Pratt did make it into the dearly departed DCEU, played by Milwaukee's favorite adopted son, Henry Winkler, in a cameo he literally phoned in. And that's perfect.
The silver age Atom was created by writer Gardner Fox, whom I've mentioned about a dozen times already, and artist Gil Kane, whomst I don't recall if I mentioned or not, but he is also a comics legend, having also created the Silver Age Green Lantern with Fox. Among his other works, Gil Kane would help create the western concept of the Graphic Novel in his 1971 work Blackmark.
The idea for the new Atom's powers allegedly came from a fan suggestion. According to yet a third comics legend, Roy Thomas, he and physicist/fandom pioneer Jerry Bails came up with the idea of using atomic compression as a basis for a hero who could shrink down to nigh-atomic size, and submitted it to DC editorial. This is basically the same theory as outlined in the foundational academic text, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
Our hero is Ray Palmer, who is already out here Szalinskimaxxing, attempting to compress matter down to a fraction of its normal size, but all his experiments come with a side effect of explosions. The key factor in his experiments is a lens crafted from a chunk of electron-degenerate matter from a white dwarf star that just happened to crash within driving distance. When he shines ultra-violet rays through the lens, he's capable of compressing the empty space within atoms and therefor shrink ordinary matter.
I am going to briefly put on a science hat, and say that this kind of electron-degenerate matter is compacted to an absurd degree, which makes it one of the heaviest theoretical substances in the universe. We see Ray struggling to lift it like it was a chunk of lead, but a chunk of a white dwarf is almost exactly one million times heavier, weighing in at ten thousand kilograms per cubic centimeter. But if we held this to scientific accuracy then not only would we not have a story, we wouldn't have a genre, so let's move past it.
After Ray implodes a typewriter, he's visited by his girlfriend, Jean Loring. Jean Loring... Jean has a long history of being hard done by the narrative. I think a fair amount of what she goes through and how she reacts to it makes sense as an illustration of how much it would suck to be the love interest of a superhero, but then she was the unfortunate victim of a brutal character assassination in 2004, and she has yet to recover from it.
Regardless! Jean Loring is introduced as a lawyer trying to prove herself, who rejects her boyfriend's marriage proposals as she wants to make good on her career before settling down to be a wife. Because this is a 1961 DC comic, getting married automatically means giving up every other aspect of herself to be a wife. But she treats the whole thing with good humor and is supportive of Ray's absolute mad science experiments. This is probably the best-case scenario for this genre of power couple in the 1960s.
Later that day, Ray is leading Jean and a group of kids in a geology club, because he's the kind of Gilligan's Island-ass scientist who can do experimental dwarf star shrink rays and geology field trips. When they're trapped by both a cave-in and a gas leak, Ray realizes realizes that the only way he can save everyone else is if he uses the shrink ray on himself. However, he's never been able to stop his experimental subjects from exploding. Even if he gets the kids out, it would be a death sentence for him.
Completely unconcerned for his own safety, Ray enshrinkifies himself, and uses his newly found physics hack to climb up to a tiny hole in the cave wall and expand it to be a viable exit. Hoping that he can survive long enough to lead Jean and the others to the escape, he runs back through the shrink ray and returns to his normal size, unharmed and molecularly stable. Ray assumes that some mineral in the cave has nullified the explosion effect, and once Jean and the others are free, he goes back to his lab and tries to analyze the minerals. However, he finds himself unable to replicate the results. Through some mystery, the only thing he can safely shrink is himself.
The second story in the issue shows Ray properly becoming the Atom. A strange little man appears in a bank, zaps some money away, and vanishes. Alma Wilson, the bank teller, is accused of stealing the money and making up some insane story to cover it up. Alma badly needs a lawyer and calls her friend Jean Loring to defend her. There's a fun twist here in that the superhero of the piece doesn't have any sort of police hotline or super-senses to alert him to crime. He only learns about this stuff because his girlfriend is the lawyer who gets all the weird cases.
There's an interesting sort of Law & Order vibe in these stories. It's not just the Atom solving crimes and fighting villains with his special shrinking pants, he's also got to help Jean prove that her clients with absurdly weird alibis are actually innocent. Jean is also an absolutely fearless lawyer, taking on a case where her client's defense is "a tiny genie stole it." She's not even trying to plea it out, she is ready to go to trial with this nonsense.
Ray tries out his new super-powers, and we get a few explanations of what his whole deal is. His costume is actually made out of the dwarf star matter that lets him shrink, and he actually wears it all the time, over his normal clothes. When he's normal size, it's so thin as to be intangible, but when he shrinks, it neatly covers up his boxy 1960s suit with skintight spandex. This is a cool idea that makes less sense the more you think about it. Physics nonsense aside, it means that he can't be normal size and in costume, which means he has to attend Justice League meetings in a teeny little doll chair.
Ray also has the ability to selectively alter his mass while retaining his full strength, allowing him to jump around like a teeny little flea man but still punch like... well, like a research scientist, but that's still pretty good when you're more little than Stuart. It comes in handy when the same tiny little man from the bank robbery shows up in his lab. This guy presumably operates under the normal functions of the square-cube law, and is no match for a man with the weight limit turned off.
The tiny little man introduces himself as Kulan Dar, a tiny alien trapped on Earth. He needs a rare metal called europium to get home, but an earth criminal named Carl Ballard is enslaving him with his own dominator ray and forcing him to steal. This ties into the aforementioned dynamic, where both Alma and Kulan Dar are both innocent, and the real struggle of the issue is proving it. Most superhero comics of the silver age don't even go as far as presuming the innocence of the villain-of-the-month. We just see flat out that they're committing crimes and thus whatever the hero does to them is justified. It's a breath of fresh air to have a story with layers to it.
Ray has to do some detective work to find Big Mean Carl and get him to stop controlling his new tiny friend. Using the lost ancient technology known as a "phone book" he is able to immediately get this wanted criminal's address and telephone number. To actually get there, Ray comes up with a stunt so absurdly audacious that you would only ever see it in a superhero comic.
Ray dials up Carl's phone number, and as soon as the call connects he shrinks down small enough to ride the phone call through the lines and punch this man in the face courtesy of AT&T. This, as we all know, is not how ANYTHING works, but it's so awesome that neither you nor I even care. The actual explanation was so convoluted that they had to include an essay explaining it on a separate page. You can read it if you want to, but it will not explain anything to any degree of satisfaction. Regardless, it's become one of the Atom's signature moves, and he can even do it over cell phone transmissions but it makes him violently ill. The atom could punch you through your smartphone right now!
There's a fun battle where the Atom has to deal with a human-sized foe and a doll-sized foe, having to get the Dominator back from Carl while keeping Kulan Dar from being seriously hurt, and it's all very interesting, and the art really sells the scale of the fight. In the end, the Atom frees Kulan Dar, Kulan Dar shows up in the court to exonerate Alma, and the DA gets humiliated in front of the whole court, which is always fun.
This comic is exceptional. There's an art to producing a science-fiction story that feels real enough that you're willing to ignore all of the obvious impossibilities in the premise. Compare the science in Star Trek: The Next Generation to that in Star Trek: Voyager. Or just compare how the Atom considers things like the mass of an object affecting its weight to how the Flash will handwave away the side effects of moving so fast you can be in two places at once and still hold a conversation. Not to say that the Flash is bad, just that the extra effort at presenting the Atom's abilities more realistically helps draw the audience in to the story being told.
At the same time, the characterization and plotting enhance that feeling of reality. Ray Palmer doesn't feel like a superhero, he feels like a scientist who does superheroics on the side. It's not a burning call for truth and justice, it's a tool that helps him with his science. Jean Loring is the one devoted to justice, and Ray's primary motivation for putting on a suit and fighting crime is to help her. They don't feel like flat archetypes going through the motions of a superhero story, they feel like people who are living their lives, and they just happen to be in a superhero story, and that is a tremendously elevating quality.
The Atom was in the next two issues of Showcase as well, and those stories are also very good, but I don't have much to say about them that I don't have here. Showcase #35 has Ray and Jean get involved in a Scooby-Doo mystery where a villain is using super-science to fake a witch's curse. Showcase #36 has the Atom trying to fight a soviet spy and a thief who uses telekinesis. All of these stories are good, but they don't really offer much to distinguish themselves from the formula. But hey, nothing wrong with more of a good thing. Until next time!
Y'know that fanon jla meets the batfam trope? I think it would be really funny if Jack Drake was alive. Cause if no one knew Tim was Robin, Jean Loring couldn't have sent Captain Boomerang after his dad
