Wednesday, July 21, 2010

The Top Ten All New Atom (Ryan Choi) Covers

If nothing else, The All New Atom had eye-popping covers that set it apart from the rest of the marketplace. His guest appearances in other books fared much worse...

10) The All New Atom #3 (November, 2006)

Injury to the eye is nothing new, but the detail here is fantastic.

9) The All New Atom #24 (August, 2008)

Way to say my Chronos through the power of sex change.

8) The All New Atom #15 (November, 2007)

An awful lot more existentially imperiled than the far more literal Real Old Atom.

7) The Brave and the Bold #9 (February, 2008)

The Sword of the Atom could get medieval on ass, but actually riding on Hawkman's spiked mace? Ryan Choi was mighty brave and/or stupid crazy.

6) The All New Atom #10 (June, 2007)

Usually, this shot is of an entering full size hero into a giant's maw, which Ryan had previously done, unnecessarily. Boxing your way out of the rotting jaw of a human-sized zombie is certainly different.

5) The All New Atom #17 (January, 2008)

I love the thought put into finding new visual hooks specific to the All New Atom. Bouncing off Wonder Woman's bracelets like a bullet meets that criteria. Heck, just associating with Wonder Woman gets Choi halfway there.

4) The All New Atom #4 (December, 2006)

A defining aspect of Ryan Choi's adventures was wry humor, and no other cover demonstrated it as well as this.

3) The All New Atom #6 (February, 2007)

The lighting sells the hell out of this piece. It feels very cyberpunk, a Blade Runner to Ray Palmer's The Incredible Shrinking Man. There's no element that would be out of place on a Ray cover-- the lab rats, the armed combat, the comparable foe-- but the presentation is totally alien to Palmer's Silver Age/Gil Kane aesthetic. Weird horror, especially body horror, was Ryan's thing.

2) The All New Atom #8 (April, 2007)

If there's one indelible image to define the series, it's Ryan Choi with his bangstick leading a bisected and de-aged Professor Hyatt to safety.

1) The All New Atom #21 (May, 2008)

The cover to The All New Atom #1 was both a hideous racial caricature and a boring, perfunctory piece. Jose Ladrönn proved a far superior cover artist to Ariel Olivetti, and by rights his effort to launch the book's final creative team would have been on the debut issue of the series. It's rather subdued by comparison to other Ryan Choi Atom covers, but it's also respectful and heroic.

Check out more spotlight countdowns of great art from the past 75 years of DC Comics Covers at DC75: Top Character Covers of the Dodranscentennial

3 comments:

LissBirds said...

Well, you delivered on your promise of more eye-poking!

I had to laugh at the existential comment. Only becuase there's a whole lot of truth in Ryan Choi having an existential crisis...

These images, on the whole, are pretty dynamic. What amazes me is Ryan coming out of a corpse BEFORE Blackest Night!

So what does Wonder Woman have against Ryan?

Diabolu Frank said...

Actually, Diana and Ryan got along great. I think she even invited him to join a team or something.

LissBirds said...

Yeah, but did he get to ride along in her breastplate like Ray Palmer did in the JLU cartoon? Bet only Ray can lay claim to that one.