Captain Atom: Armageddon #4 (March, 2006)

The WildCats were totally pissed off at Captain Atom for no apparent reason, and played Six Degrees of William Shatner "to decide who gets to kick your ass." Maul "won," even though Atom had been repeatedly filmed fighting the Wildstorm Universe's Superman, and easily handled the chump (by manipulating his atoms back to human form, another magical first time power use.)

Grifter and Nikola Hanssen were still hanging out at a burger joint, discussing her new Void powers.

The remaining WildCats talked about triple-teaming Captain Atom, but ended up falling by numbers. Since I stopped reading Wildcats comics in 1998, I was unaware Voodoo had all of Jean Grey's old powers. Get this-- Captain Atom overloaded her telepathy by "giving" her all of his memories at once and overloading her brain. How does that even work? That makes about as much sense as a magnet to a juggalo. Next, we all try to pretend Warblade is more keen than Wolverine with blades can could literally slice atoms. We know this because Warblade stood there and explained how boss he was while Captain Atom was down, before getting hit by a geyser of energy for being slow. Katana Zealot deflected more of that energy with her katana oh right katana, which could "shave the rough edges off an electron." See, the writer remembered electrons from grade school science, and thought referencing them in a nonsensical context would make him sound mind-bending like Grant Morrison, instead of mind-thwarting like Sarah Palin quotes. The only way I could mock this more is if Captain Atom hadn't actually fought a samurai with an X-Ionizer katana that cut his shell open back in 1987. However, that guy took two issues to deal with, not three credibility-straining pages of Zealot running around in a bathing suit.



Grifter and Nikola Hanssen were held back by security forces at the monument trying to keep people away from the "meta-human trouble." I've been dancing around the DC Comics term "metahuman" for four synopsizes now because I thought Wildstorm called them "suprahuman" or "post-human" or some such. Anyway, Grifter taught Nikola how to teleport them both to the monument, where he drew down on Captain Atom. Supposedly, Grifter had a secret weapon beyond a friggin' gun, but he couldn't seem to fire it before Captain Atom finished debating stepping through wormhole to the moon generated by The Engineer. Would this comic book please just shut up?

"Fight Scene" was drummed up by Will Pfeifer, Giuseppe Camuncoli and Sandra Hope.

ElseWednesday featuring Wildstorm!

• JLA/Cyberforce (2005) @ Diana Prince: Wonder Woman
• Flashpoint #3 (February, 2000) @ The Idol-Head of Diabolu
• DC/WS DreamWar #4 (September, 2008) @ DC Bloodlines