Power of the Atom Podcast #613

Mightier Than the Sword!

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• Domestic dispute!
• By Roger Stern, Graham Nolan, & K.S. Wilson!
• From DC Comics's April 1989 cover-dated Power of the Atom #11!

Among the most famous maxims of Hillel the Elder was "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?" It's a recognition that a person must take care of themselves and their individual interests while also observing the needs of their community, with an emphasis on urgency over complacency and unrealized "good intentions." Meanwhile, some common advice given to authors includes “write what you know” and "“write for yourself." The assumption is that your writing will be more authentic and better informed if you're working from a place of utmost expertise, from within the self.

Aside from being the fourth best Superman writer in the glory days of triangle numbering, Roger Stern is most known for his Marvel Comics work, especially a lengthy tenure on The Avengers. To my knowledge, he's been married once since 1982, no divorces, and he cannot alter his size and density with a belt composed from white dwarf matter. I therefore find this comic perplexing. You would think that spending an entire issue on the beef between Ray Palmer and the man his ex-wife committed adultery with would perhaps come from a personal place. Yes, Ray abandoned Jean Loring after discovering the affair, and she went on to marry Paul Hoben, who proved to be much more inclined toward jealousy and domestic violence. There's some interpersonal drama to mine there, and Stern is oft-acclaimed for finding the humanity in super-hero stories like "The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man" and "Under Siege." Yet, this issue is like a four color episode of Thirtysomething, which hadn't even been invented yet.

Two issues earlier, Ray and Jean had shared a hug in the kitchen, as Ray was still dealing with grief over the destruction of the alien tribe he'd joined, including his yellow-skinned rebound chick that didn't play at all like some sort of "gone native" post-Vietnam narrative. It was sort of a macho '80s "Eat Pray Love" with frog steeds; these jaundiced little people soothing the savage breast of a white boy in crisis, literally existing only so long as Ray needed warm bodies to stab with one implement or another. I don't know how long that hug in the kitchen with Jean lasted for, but both Jean's second husband Paul Hoben and Ray's prospective love interest Enrica Negrini managed to individually walk in on them and have baby breakdowns over it. One of them getting the wrong idea would be understandable, but for two separate individuals to come to the same conclusion, I think this may have been less Rashomon and more Fear of Flying. To paraphrase SisQó, Jong Y-Jong, Jong, Jong.

Both Enrica and Paul individually interrogate and instigate, feeding especially into Paul's deep insecurities, until he's hurling accusations of infidelity and donning a spare shrinking belt Ray had given him before returning to the Amazon in one of the Sword of the Atom specials. Most likely, this whole thing was an excuse to amend that bit of ill-considered continuity, but having Paul travel through a phone line to assault a sleep-deprived Ray Palmer was more a compounding than correction. Of all the shrinking characters, Ray is the only one that travels through phone lines, but now we get to add an asterisk "also his ex's side piece." Further, the fight starts on page six and ends on twenty-one. In a book that's been notably light on action, thirteen pages go to the epic battle between a super-hero and an attorney-at-law. Even with a host of handicaps, like Ray's only getting four hours sleep from spending the day studying Humbug's synthetic skin, or not wanting to hurt Paul, and being overconfident in handling Paul with kid gloves but still, that's... a lot of pages. Surely an untrained fighter using a shrinking device for the first time time could have been subdued with a quickness, but instead things escalate from home invasion and assault to attempted murder when they begin to sword fight with a busted pair of scissors.

Ray has a 'Nam flashback and almost kills Paul while seeing him as a Boundsman of Morlaidh, just as police show up to investigate. Regardless, it's played as Paul was being a big dumb jerk who tried to wreck Ray's lab and cut up the Humbug skin over a silly misunderstanding. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here in 2023 wondering why Paul wasn't even a suspect in Brad Meltzer's Identity Crisis. They could have dubbed him "Red Flag" and had him team-up with Buzz Baxter in DC vs. Marvel. But also, the same Jean Loring that told Paul that if he left the house with the belt, he shouldn't bother coming back, then drove partway to Ivy Town in a sheer nightgown with a cutout from the cleavage to the navel held together by fishnet. Girl could get arrested running around like that, and did, when she got busted speeding with "I'm a super-hero's ex looking to break up a fight in my négligée" as her excuse. Grrrl, you all about that drama. Ray and Paul had to phone into the police station to get her released, with a sad little panel of Paul surrendering the belt for bad measure.

Returning to the opening quandary, who was this for? Was there a little seven year itch in Rog's life he was working out in print? Was he writing what he knew, or was what he knew the loosey-goose handling of domestic violence from period network television? Stern thankfully, blessedly takes the next couple issues off, returns to wrap up some storylines for another couple issues, and then abandons the troubled series he launched to die three issues later. Was this issue just vamping to fill space and sorta kinda not really resolve a subplot? Didn't this book launch on the premise that The Atom was returning to super-heroics in a Post-Crisis bold new direction that would see him pursuing the shady government faction responsible for destroying Morlaidh for reasons unknown? A year later, and the series is about negotiating book tours and resolving marital strife? If this was a series Stern was writing for himself, reflecting his life, what he really needed was couples counseling. If he was writing for the market, it's no wonder work started drying up in the '90s, with the Superman titles continuing to serve as a de facto welfare state. "Hey buddy, the comic industry doesn't have pensions, but we do have Action Comics. Want to write by committee a weekly adaptation of ABC television's Lois & Clark for half-a-dozen years? I think maybe it's the lead-in for Thirtysomething? Boy, I sure like me some Timothy Busfield dramedy." There was a whole article in Amazing Heroes #162 about course-correcting this title after Invasion! to be more action-oriented, but we're right back into The Big Chill with aging boomers crying about their Ivy League educations and publisher's advances and having to choose between a genius scientist and a lawyer. I guess somebody thought that was an audience worth chasing, but it was stinkin' thinkin'.

Jean Loring,POTAcast,Power of the Atom,Ray Palmer,

Power of the Atom Podcast #612

Bah, Humbug!

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• Recurring villain debut: Humbug!
• By Roger Stern, Graham Nolan, K.S. Wilson and more!
• From DC Comics's March 1989 cover-dated Power of the Atom #10!

A bald Caucasian mercenary with bushy inward-slanted eyebrows under sunglasses listened to a disembodied electronic voice give him orders to target Ray Palmer in Ivytown. Wearing a fashionably formal all black leather outfit with gloves, broken up only by a fuchsia ascot with black polka-dots, the villain rose from a futuristic chaise lounge to view a circular screen projecting footage of the Atom in action. Mimicking the Mighty mite move-for-move like a depilated Taskmaster, this so-called Humbug was chastised for not paying attention. Able to chew bubblegum and jump snap kick at the same time, Humbug was well aware that Ray Palmer jad vanished eighteen months prior, only to spring up in the past six weeks to become a hang-up in someone's master plan. At one point, Humbug removed his sunglasses, revealing pupil-less eyes and that he had been wearing a fake nose to cover the smooth patch down to his lipless, toothy grin. He them bent a wrench in his bare hands, demonstrating great strength, not that we could possibly take him seriously going forward now that we know he's basically wearing a Groucho Marx novelty disguise. Say, did you ever notice that Peter O'Toole is a duophallic name?

At the home of Professor Emeritus Alpheus V. Hyatt, Ray Palmer was demonstrating density-control enabled one-armed push while topless for Ricki Negrini, who he's totally not trying to smash. There's a demonstration of how the Atom can don his costume automatically by shifting it onto his body from another dimension, and Negrini questioned whether the intermittent light show was dependent upon his mood. Norman Brawler showed up to has out the details of their travel plans to New York for a meeting with Warner Books to sign contracts and negotiate promotion for the upcoming revised paperback edition of his biography. Norman would have to catch a plane alone, because Ray intended to literally phone in for his part once all the arrangements had been made so that he could continue researching his enhanced abilities. Also, his fellow scientists had to help talk him into going forward with the new edition, after all the headaches the hardcover had caused upon his return. As the punchline to a thing that in theory resembled a gag, the scientists also threatened to go on tour with an a cappella rendering of the 1909 hit "By the Light of the Silvery Moon." Boy, it's a good thing the average comic reader of 1989 was up on references to a 1953 Doris Day musical. DC Comics: Please share us with your grandparents! We'll take what audience we can get! Yes, comic books are a dollar now! We know you're on a fixed income, but maybe you can haggled for a discount at your local comic shop! We know gas is currently 66¢ per gallon and burning it in a drive would take longer than reading this comic. Look, can you just give it back to little Timmy? What do you mean he's reading The Punisher?!? What kind of grandparent are you? You took Timmy to see Death Wish 3? No yes, of course we'll miss the Gipper, too. You know, this is a long distance periodical, we'd better go before the rates go up again.

In Calvin City, Ray's ex-wife and her new husband argue about having caught her in a kitchen embrace with Palmer as she was consoling him over the deaths of Princess Laethwen and her people in Morlaidh. Paul Hoben's insecurity will be referenced again at the end of the issue, as he determines that the only way to win back Jean Loring's heart is by digging an old Atom belt out of the basement and perform some size-alterations himself. I don't think it's a pee-pee thing, but when you use a size-altering belt as a marital aid, it seems like maybe it's a pee-pee thing. I mention it now because I don't want to have to set this stupid subplot up again because we're all going to forget I'd mentioned Paul Hoben by the end of this thing, and these synopses are only about five minutes long. It's not the length of the podcast, it's the snore of a subplot.

Since the C.I.A. had been covertly monitoring Ray Palmer's movements, Humbug arranged to impersonate their superior on a telephone call, then orders the agents to Salt Lake City. I guess that means he's a master of impersonations, at least. Continuing that theme, Humbug next served as Paul Hoben's can driver, as a window washer outside Warner Books, and finally as a gopher bringing coffee into the meeting. Ray is pushed through the phone line by Professor Hyatt singing the 1939 duet "Deep Purple" by Nino Tempo & April Stevens, in case Little Timmy wants to ask Great Uncle Jedidiah about this comic bo-- little Timmy never picked the book back up again, did he? This is how we get cancelled in the same number of issues as Wasteland and how Doc Savage outlasted us, isn't it? This is why the Blackhawk revival is more fondly remembered? Because on page 14, after spending three pages on details of the book publication contract, the bad guy finally attacks the good guy with pink gas pellets?

The Atom shrank to avoid the knockout gas, but immediately got suckered into growing and coughing, but shrank again to escape. There was a running fight through bland office spaces across routine five panel pages of serviceable art involving the Tiny Titan landing a punch that knocked the stupid glasses/rubber nose combo off. Atom noted Humbug's resistance to the gas, great strength and endurance, and finally his vanishing into himself, leaving a full body husk of probably artificial skin. Oh, and Humbug was still in disguise the whole time, wearing a green windbreaker, khakis, and white sneakers. Appropriate, since Power of the Atom is the khaki of comics. Humbug was back in his cruising dandy outfit to be berated by his anonymous boss over the unauthorized, high profile attack, but Humbug was rude and kooky and a tad insubordinate while swearing that he's get 'im next time. Yep, just a big ol' pile of khaki right here.

Jean Loring,POTAcast,Power of the Atom,Ray Palmer,

Power of the Atom Podcast #611

Victory Day

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• Joining the Justice League?
• By Roger Stern, Graham Nolan, K.S. Wilson and more!
• From DC Comics's Holiday 1988 cover-dated Power of the Atom #9 & Justice League International #24!

Counting a Maxwell Lord Bonus Book, in the third story from Justice League International #24 by Keith Giffen, J. M. DeMatteis, Kevin Maguire, & Joe Rubinstein, the team has a post-Invasion super-hero party at the New York Embassy. It doubles as a recruitment drive for a second European-based division. Everyone seems happy to see a "real" Green Lantern in Hal Jordan, especially Hawkman. Hal himself is pleased to see Ray Palmer and Ralph Dibny, saying it felt like old times. He's got his back to Katar and doesn't reference him, so it's almost as cold as when Ray says "Too bad Flash couldn't be here." Wally West was standing right there, but Elongated Man sort of consoled "He means the real Flash, Wally." Meanwhile, Hawkwoman was on the other side of the room with Ice being sexually harassed by the Creeper.

The Atom sat on Hal Jordan's shoulder in silent agreement as the Corpsman assessed "This isn't the League I know." Hawkman thrust his finger angrily in the general direction of the group, warning that they should burn their J.L.I. invites if they knew what was good for them. Katar continued to excoriate the undisciplined, self-indulgent, irresponsible, foul-mouthed, immature misfits. The Thanagarian hoped that his circle of men of character and fortitude would be a good example to this lot. Atom piped in with the defense "Aw, c'mon Katar-- they can't be that bad. J'Onn seems pretty proud of this bunch." Hawkman countered that the Martian Manhunter had changed too, singing and dancing on the front lawn while looking like Gumby when he thought no one could see him.

When some temporarily shrunken Khunds were spontaneously restored to regular size, they unwisely confronted the heroes, and Atom was one of the many metahumans tripping over themselves to round the aliens up. Having served his role of disgruntled fan proxy to the hilt, Hawkman finally took this moment to quit loudly and directly to J'Onn J'Onzz's face. It would have been really cool if Hawkwoman had stayed on without her lesser half, but she would have soon enough been rebooted from the team regardless. Meanwhile, shameless Elongated Man took the opportunity to sign-up for Justice League Europe.

Back in his home title, J'Onn J'Onzz strikes an Uncle Sam pose to declare that he wants Atom for the JLI. Ray's already declining at the top of the following page. Palmer starts off on the "it's not you, it's me" tip, but without any provocation slides right into "but actually, it is you." The Atom thinks that there are too many bozos and jerks on the team, and when Guy Gardner leads a drunken conga line into the room, Ray asks "Didn't we used to fight guys like him?" Sure, Ray's life is a mess and he hasn't settled into his old life again, but mainly he doesn't want to spend time with guys with the manners of Attila the Hun who would make ring projection bunny ears behind the Martian Manhunter's back. The Atom wasn't tolerating the open disrespect for himself and J'Onn, so he trips Guy so that he lands on his fanny and spills his beer.

Hal Jordan jokes that Ray Palmer should have been a Green Lantern, since the Atom wasn't afraid to interrupt Batman's own hard pitch to reclaim a classic Justice Leaguer. Looking at Guy and G'nort, Ray figures the Corps is in even worse shape than the League. If you want evidence that Hal's a moron, he took career advise from The Atom, star of exactly two short-lived solo series in the past sixty years, and the last one was three decades ago. But then, Hal saw financial stability in being one of the anchor series in Action Comics Weekly, soon to be reclaimed as a Superman solo monthly.

The Atom jumps out a window to escape this asylum, drifting near-weightlessly on the winds between New York skyscrapers. His newfound Al Pratt-style atomic punch allows him to rip the rear chassis off a drunken driver before he plowed into a celebratory parade. A cop alerts the Atom to a nearby riot, so Ray rides a tossed bullhorn before growing to talk sense into the crowd. Failing that, he racks a guy, as you do. Batman shows to congratulate the Mighy Mite on his nutcracking, and the JLI takes it from there.

Alpheus Hyatt accepts a collect call, and the Atom is back at Ivy University. Tricked by call forwarding, Ray walks right into a surprise welcome home party. Enrica Negrini used his return from Australia as an excuse for the celebration he didn't get when he unexpectedly came back from Brazil. Ray surrogate father, adventurer Ted Ralston, even flew in from the Andes. Norman Brawler pitched Ray on an expanded edition of his biography for the Warner Books paperback edition. Ray was never one for big parties, so he snuck off to brew some decaf coffee before planning to sneak out the back. He'd been looking for his ex-wife, Jean Hoben, who stumbled in looking for her own cup of java. They spoke for the first time since Ray'd come home, and it was the first Jean had heard of the deaths in Morlaidh. By the end, everybody was crying as the former couple embraced, including Enrica, who stumbled upon them. Jean's current husband Paul, recently chastized for hitting the booze too hard at the gathering, was quite the sullen boy as well...

Justice League International,Hawkman,Green Lantern,Hawkgirl,Elongated Man,Jean Loring,POTAcast,Power of the Atom,Ray Palmer,

Power of the Atom Podcast #610

Eye of the Storm

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• Invasion! Aftermath Extra!
• By Roger Stern, Graham Nolan, K.S. Wilson and more!
• From DC Comics's Holiday 1988 cover-dated Power of the Atom #8, plus Starman #6 & Invasion #3!

The Alien Alliance Invasion attempt has ended in victory for Earth. In Starman #6, Will Payton helps save the Sydney Opera House, then hears a voice of congratulation. The Atom soon grows to assign a face to the disembodied voice and shake the neophyte Starman's hand. The pair bond over being reluctant super-heroes who nonetheless served mankind when called upon. Will had heard about Ray's book and wondered if it had any heroism pointers, but Palmer admitted that it was more a blueprint for what not to do in the trade. Most especially, the Atom warned Starman against revealing his secret identity. Since both books were written by Roger Stern, Ray's voice was consistent, and since it was drawn by Tom Lyle, so was my level of enthusiasm for the art.

In a hard-sell of the Atom in his own book, the least effective was to entice new readers, the splash of Power of the Atom #8 tells everyone about how the Mighty Mite was first hero on the ground and among the last wrangling stragglers. I'm guessing Tasmania Devil doesn't count since he was beaten off-panel on his home turf. Anyway, Ray was floating on air currents, heard a cry for help, and lifted debris using his size and density altering powers as a wedge. A Khund took potshots during this effort, and Atom didn't like that, so a beating was delivered. The authorities took the Khund away in chains, so my first question was where did they come up with Khund-sized neck shackles, and my second was what happened to all those Alien Alliance P.O.W.s? Like, are they still here? Were they returned to the Khundian empire in exchange for Blasters? Were they repatriated to Australia?

Amid the rubble of Brisbane, Chronos was gathering alien weapons off the bodies of dead Khunds. A Thanagarian took offense to this, and took a shot. Chronos timed out on that, and when the Thanagarian landed to assess for presumed disintegration, David Clinton gave him that love touch. By which I mean Chronos touched his shoulder from behind and aged him to death. I have to assume Thanagarians never fully recovered from the Equalization Plague if one got outflanked in personal combat by Tricky Dick.

Power Girl and Green Lantern were also helping to shore-up the battle damaged Sydney Opera House, so that's probably how the Atom came to ride on Hal Jordan's shoulder back to a military base. Even got his costume repaired via power ring. Don't get used to palling around with old school Justice Leaguers, Ray. The quality of your team associations is going to drop markedly going forward. Soldiers look on at the desiccated corpse of the Thanagarian, pinned to a wall by his wings, tagged with the note "Atom-- The Truce Is Over. -C." It was really thoughtful of Chronos to sign the letter, given the breadth of the Atom's rogues gallery. Then again, he signed with the letter "C," and the entirety of them are c-list, so there's still some potential for confusion. When Ray accidentally pulled off Hawkman's honor wings a few issues ago, it was a set-up for this limp fakeout. Such is the sorry state of affairs known collectively by the title "Power of the Atom."

Meanwhile, Jean Hoban called Norman Brawler's house in hopes of an update on Ray, but Enrica Negrini answered. I swear that name sounds like something they'd come up with on a sitcom when a character's about to get busted for pretending to be an exotic foreigner. I don't remember answering phones while visiting other people's houses back in the cordfull days of landlines, maybe they do things differently in Italy, and Jean asks if this is Enrica who answered. She then does one of those drawn out "Yee-e-s" and identifies herself as "Doctor Negrini," so it's like the Donna Reed show where Jean Loring is playing both parts using mirrors. Dahwktoohr Negrini doesn't know anything, but wonders to herself if Jean is overly concerned about the well-being of a man that she swore to love, honor, and protect for the rest of her life and was still married to a couple or three years ago. I guess we're still two decades away from Silver Linings Playbook blowing away the myth that people still have feelings for their significant others after the end of a relationship. This one page went a long way in turning me off on Enrica Negrini, but I do have to remind myself that she was talking to Jean. Who knows what kind of crazy was coming across that doesn't translate to the page, or how much her being the worst brings out the worst in others?

Both Ray Palmer and David Clinton managed to separately make the 15-21 hour trip back to San Clemente, CA in the span of that conversation. When authorities refuse to investigate a power local figure on the say-so of a man who wears his underwear on the outside, the Atom commits the actual crime of breaking into Clinton's house. There's a gauntlet of technology and thugs in riot gear for the Tiny Titan to overcome while Clinton watches it all on closed-circuit television from his yacht. When that fails, as he surely knew it would, he just remote detonates his own house to get the Atom. How do you figure that turned out? Or when Chronos and his henchman buddy go to check the site of the explosion in full costume? Sure, Atom could have figured a away to follow the signal to the yacht, but instead he'll just let Chronos come to him and serve knuckle sandwiches at the picnic. And again, set up, Chronos eventually gets his hand on Atom's shoulder, which Atom rightly guessed would be immune to the rapid aging effect because of the white dwarf matter, based purely on a hunch. He offers no evidence as to why that would be, and it was an extremely stupid and dangerous way to bait Chronos into taking exactly one punch before his evading with time-jumping again, but comics. Bad comics. Anyway, a bomb goes over and fries Chronos' suit a few minutes into the future, and then catches up to Ray with an inverted final splash page explosion.

You can't say that DC didn't try to push the Atom during his brief and unexceptional run. The series tied multiple issues into the Invasion event, and as a reward, Bart Sears drew Atom on Superman's shoulder dead center on the cover of the final issue of the mini-series. I still manage to miss that fact nine times out of ten while looking at said cover, but I was actively looking for the perhaps too Tiny Titan this time. Twenty pages into the-- ugh-- third eighty-page issue, the Atom can be seen riding Amanda Waller's shoulder after dropping Chronos off at Belle Reve Federal Penitentiary in Louisiana. The negative-image gene bomb dropped by the Dominators causes humans with the metagene to trigger uncontrollable power spikes, compromising a prison filthy with them. As a dude who gets his abilities from a suit, the Atom gets drafted to help "neutralize" inmates "any way possible." When Task Force X voluntary agent Nightshade is affected, Atom asks "Ms. Waller" how she wants him to proceed. It's rendered moot relatively quickly though, as the affected metagene-actives soon grow gravely ill. It all gets resolve without any more Atom action to cover, so come back next week when I finally close the loop on April Fool's Month and my covering of this series up to my recent guest appearance on the Justice League International: Bwah-Ha-Ha Podcast...

Chronos,Jean Loring,POTAcast,Power of the Atom,Ray Palmer,Hawkman,Green Lantern,Nightshade,Power of the Atom Podcast,Post-Crisis,

Power of the Atom Podcast #609

Behind Enemy Lines!

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• Invasion! First Strike! Extra!
• By Roger Stern, Graham Nolan, K.S. Wilson and more!
• From DC Comics's Holiday 1988 cover-dated Power of the Atom #7, plus Invasion #2 & Hawk and Dove #1!

Chronos broke off hostilities with the Atom to address the greater menace of thinly disguised Yellow Peril Fu Manchu E.T.s crossing the border into... checks notes... Australia? So it's definitely 1988, the year Wolverine was both the shrimp and the barbie. Chronos had popped in a VHS tape to record the Dominators and Khunds demanding Earth imprison its metahuman population, and if I recall correctly, Invasion! was where the term "metahuman" got popularized at DC Comics. There's also footage of the Alien Alliance surrounding the Earth with an armada of battleships, so Chronos tries to get Atom into shaking on a truce. Ray leaves Clinton hanging on account of that whole numerous murder attempts rap, which really puts Clinton out. Honestly, I think Chronos wanted his value acknowledged and to maybe even form a friendship with Atom, or else why keep making excuses for not just killing him when he had the chance? Ray Palmer is just not a forgive and forget kind of dude, and once he decides you're not worth messing with, he ain't gonna.

In one of those "Simpsons predicted the future" moments, when The Atom uses the branded phone of future DC overlords', that's AT&T-- reach out an touch someone. Reach out and touch... an Australian. Actually, there's aliens working the old-timey switchboards like Ernestine going "one ringy-dingy," allowing the Atom to drop his load in a Khundian earhole so deep, put his hairy butt to sleep. Also, on the floor, because that Knund was sitting on an office swivel chair before he passed out. This is the kind of insanity that doesn't get translated into the movies, folks.

The Tiny Titan dodged a laser blast from another Khund that barbqued a Citadelian that had tried to grab him, then shifted his mass to hit that Khund full force to lay him out. Chronos was still on the phone counting up to make sure the line was clear for Atom, so Ray picked up the phone just long enough to tell Clinton he'd see him after the war and hang-up.

Okay, so the book actually started with the Atom in the rafters of a warehouse, where Khunds are forcing Aussies to load a truck. The Tiny Terror shrank and dropped on the back of a Khund's neck, and that panel served as Atom's tiny cameo in the second issue of the Invasion mini-series, redrawn by Todd McFarlane. Reminds me of a cartoon from one of DC's free advertorial comics that had Jason Todd on crutches complaining that in his one chance to get drawn by John Byrne in his prime for Legends, he got beaten by a mob and left in a cast for the rest of the event.

The Atom grabbed a blaster pistol and shot another Knund in the nards, and the point of all this dirty pool is to show him as a no-nonsense warrior. That Amazing Heroes article I referenced last time made out like the book wasn't selling and these Invasion tie-ins were intended as a soft relaunch of the book. They had a new artist and a new attitude with the hope that the crossover would expose them to a broader audience. But again, the Sword of the Atom was whet with the blood of little, yellow, different, better aliens. Why were these cut-rate Klingons getting kid gloves with little tweeting birds circling the head of that dude who Atom gave that bop that make you break yo neck?

In a hash of U.K. cliche dialogue and one guy who is clearly Crocodile Dundee, the Aussies congratulate the Atom and ask what he's doing in Oz. Like when you tell someone "how ya' doin'" and they actually stop and tell you in detail exactly how, in fact, they are doing, Ray spends five pages telling them what I told you at the start, including the part about Chronos showing the video of the aliens making their demands like the Aussies didn't see the broadcast themselves before they were literally captured by those aliens and forced to work by them. Taking a page from John Oliver, it's like Dumb Inception. It's like Inception, but really dumb. You got my flashback in your flashback.

The Aussies decided to put on Khund armor and help the Atom infiltrate a labor camp. Should I add a "u" to "labour" when it's an Australian fictional alien labor camp? Also, why is there a superfluous "u" in "labour" but not in the Labor Party? I think the U.K. is just pulling one over on us Yanks with their notoriously dry wit, laughing at ever "u" and how Madonna used to try to pronounce them with her fake accent when she was married to Guy Ritchie. Also, why did people complain when Snatch was really similar to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels but better and make Guy Ritchie self-conscious, so that he started remaking Italian dramas with Madonna instead of just doing more hyperactive and stylized heist movies, the thing he was actually good at. Where were we? Oh yes, Ray Palmer spending a page telling Crocodile Dundee his origin story again, plus a clumsy transition to Jean Loring-Hoben making her new husband Paul jealous by worrying over her ex fighting aliens. All of those theoretical new fans are going to be all over size-altering Al Bundy telling them about his four touchdowns in one game.

Chronos finally made it to Cape York Peninsula by this point, and used his timey-wimey aircraft to evade some Daxamites feeling themselves with new super-powers. On the ground, no matter what you think of Australians, they did not fool the Khunds for a second just by wearing their body armor. I remember fondly back to 1988 when I first encountered the Atom shrinking and altering his density so that he could fire himself like a bullet through a Khund's body. I mean, it was just the shoulder, but the Atom was like the Wolverine of non-lethal, impermanent trauma to an anonymous alien's non-vital appendage. DC Comics-- There's No Stopping Us From Being Milquetoast Until Dan Didio Turns The Entire Universe Into A Bill O'Reilly Wet Dream. Tell promotions to work on that tag line. A bit unwieldy and dated.

Chronos reaches the base that Atom called into, then uses his time-memory powers to see a flashback of the Atom narrating a flashback to when Chronos ran a tape flashing back to the aliens making their demands. Scintillating. Meanwhile, it's full revolt at the work camp, as men in torn shirts with purloined laser pistols and the aliens who had the legal right to own and carry said blasters shoot at each other until people die in a bloodless, Comics Code Authority approved manner. This gets the Atom so upset that he may have caused some aliens to accidentally run into each other which perhaps caused fatalities but remains open to interpretation. Also, his costume is strategically torn to show off a bit of man-boob and be easy to replicate across several guest appearances in other event tie-in titles. Oh, and Chronos finally reaches the labor camp, where the Atom continues to refuse to have anything to do with him, so Chronos fires a cannon at him that turns out to be directed at a Khund aiming at Ray from behind. The Knund is aged to dust by the blast. Kill of the week goes to Chronos. Good luck with reader retention on the strength of that. Speaking of crossovers, the Atom joins up with a host of other super-heroes to attack an Alien Alliance base in-- Melbourne, I think? Everyone assumes Australia is just one big Mad Max back lot, so wherever. In another flashback but from Hawk and Dove #1, Ray's palmed by Oberon, who seems quite pleased to tower over someone else for a change. These aren't the kind of cameos that do Ray any favors. He also gets another panel in Invasion! #2. Nobody thinks that Invasion was Todd McFarlane's best work, but when a paunchy red and blue bean bag goes flying past the Creeper during the super-heroic assault on an alien base in Melbourne, the Toddster gives Atom particularly short shrift.

Chronos,Jean Loring,POTAcast,Power of the Atom,Ray Palmer,Power of the Atom Podcast,Post-Crisis,

Power of the Atom Podcast #608

Time, Time, Time -- See What's Become of Me

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• Chronos strikes with art by a Legend!
• By Roger Stern, John Byrne & K.S. Wilson!
• From DC Comics's Winter 1988 cover-dated Power of the Atom #6!

I've been griping about flashbacks and recaps for seven straight episodes, so why am I so enthused about an issue that's pretty much nothing but that? Maybe because it's something of a greatest hits clip show drawn by one of the all-time greats? He's not great in this particular issue, and in fact it's so bad that I'm really questioning the skills of his inker on this, but even a bad Beatles number is going to be better than a good Yoko Ono one. I have to assume that this issue was drawn by single most popular artist in comics at the time, John Byrne, as some sort of personal favor to his old friend and collaborator Roger Stern. When Byrne finally quit Superman in a huff and passed on further work from the company, as he is wont to do, Stern took over writing that title. Presumably, Byrne's "World of..." mini-series had been scripted in advance, and he was already taking work on Marvel's New Universe line to dance on the grave of Jim Shooter's reign as editor-in-chief. I believe this was his last published DC job while prepping to take over Avengers West Coast and launch The Sensational She-Hulk, so he wasn't hurting for work.

Speaking of leaving titles abruptly with ill will, it isn't hard to read between the lines in an interview that remaining creative team gave to Amazing Heroes magazine. Editor Mike Carlin subtweeted that Dwayne Turner's replacement was "good, reliable, and cares about the job he's doing," implying that he hadn't. The new guy, Graham Nolan, was far less diplomatic. The transcript reads, "the stories were fun, but the artwork was really [makes rude noise] atrocious." I've judged Turner harshly on this podcast, but the truth is that he got a lot better after this first assignment, and whatever his failings, I think bagging on him in print is deeply unprofessional. Nolan also dismisses the value of his Kubert School education, seems to pointedly emphasize his preference of John Romita Sr. over his son's work, rips on the Carlin-edited Doc Savage book, and generally comes off as a jerk. I mean, we all know John Byrne is one of the biggest jerks in comics, but he's John Byrne. Graham Nolan doesn't get to swagger like this just because he got lucky enough to design a para-militaristic luchador for a well-publicized stunt that's netted him royalties ever since. I've bought comics because of Dwayne Turner and dropped them because of Graham Nolan. Dwayne Turner went on to work on a-list films, while Nolan just gets a contractually obligated thanks in the fine print of the ones with Bane in them.

Ray Palmer was enjoying a day out with Normal Brawler at the Ivytown Festival without getting swarmed by press, even though he had an entire C.I.A. detail following him unnoticed. Regardless, Ray got snatched in broad daylight out from under his noticed by men working for Chronos. Kept under sedation, Chronos seeks revenge by trying to emotionally break the Atom by forcing him to relive his most traumatic moments while in a dream state. They start with the rainy night he catches Jean Loring stepping out on him, then move to his childhood dog getting run over, his father's death by cancer while in his teens, the mission against Mr. Memory that saw him join the Justice League of America, his solo run-in with Dr. Light, his initial battle with Chronos, the destruction of New Morlaidh, and they even put a pin in his mother's death. Meanwhile, Chronos also recalls his early encounters with the Mighty Mite, and then a recent confrontation with Blue Beetle that left him stranded in the age of the dinosaurs. In an admittedly impressive move, Chronos cobbles together enough technology to put himself in intermittent stasis, roused at various points in history by equipment failures. Imagine all the untold stories of Rip Van Clinton scavenging for replacement parts in various ages. Never forget that Chronos looks like Richard Nixon but is named David Clinton. It's like that meme connecting Lincoln and Kennedy, except nowhere near as intricate or interesting. I apologize for bringing it up.

Ray Palmer's strong connection to Princess Laethwen and general lust for life break him out of his conditioning long enough for the Atom to shrink and extricate himself from the device manipulating him. The Tiny Titan then jumps around clobbering the fuchsia fascists working under Chronos in his sprawling headquarters. See, Chronos's stasis finally petered out seven years in the past, so he Biff Tannened himself a fortune on the speculative markets. Why he didn't shoot graduate student Ray Palmer in the head I'll chalk up to temporal paradox, but his not doing it while Ray was sleeping today is pure Dr. Evil nonsense. Anyway, Chronos had been called away from giving his archenemey...sad dreams... to hear about how Australia was being pummeled in an assault by an extraterrestrial alien alliance. Despite being at Rog 2000 drawing levels at best, Byrne's layouts and the traces of his style are just so much more dynamic and pleasing than the previous issues that it's enough for me to overlook how this issue does literally everything that I've been griping about on the story front. Kind of how Atom has to overlook being jerked around by Chronos so that they can team up to fend off the Invasion!

Jean Loring,Sword of the Atom,Ray Palmer,Chronos,POTAcast,Justice League of America,Power of the Atom,Power of the Atom Podcast,Post-Crisis,

Power of the Atom Podcast #606

What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?

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• Featuring Hawkman and Hawkwoman!
• By Roger Stern, Dwayne Turner & K.S. Wilson!
• From DC Comics's November 1988 cover-dated Power of the Atom #4!

Years ago, my buddy the Irredeemable Shag bought a set of Power of the Atom off eBay or something and tried to blame me for recommending them when his read-through fared poorly. I've never read this series before. What I have read, I would never recommend. When I made a guest appearance on his Justice League International: Bwah-Ha-Ha Podcast this week, he also tried to take me to task for slagging Roger Stern's work on the Will Payton Starman series. I read a few issues of each, they were lousy, and I frankly don't need to eat the entire meal if the first few bites taste like a dish sponge pulled out of a drain in a truck stop diner kitchen. The issue we're covering today is one of the ones I bought decades ago, when I was collecting Hawkman appearances. To say that it was better on the second read is damning with faint praise.

I had my own Hawkman reboot and redesign in mind way back in the day. My take was an acknowledgement of previous continuity, but with a new Hawkman in a different setting with a redesigned costume. Focus on telling stories that I felt were clearer, isolating the hero from the greater DC Universe to explore what I felt were his strengths. Boil off the accumulated crud and get back to the inherent appeal of the property.

Not so much with the Atom. Besides never having a multi-arc "run" on a series in mind, the truth is that I don't think the Atom property has inherent appeal. Pop culture was filthy with shrunken people narratives in the 20th century, and there's a good half-dozen tiny super-heroes to choose from. The Atom only matters because of who his creators were, and when he was created, and how he was one of the foundational Silver Age science heroes when Julie Schwartz offered the first true shared universe of DC properties in the 1950s. If you're not emphasizing Ray Palmer's unique flavor of shrinking heroes and his connections to the Justice League of America, there's not much else to sell readers.

So the issue opens with Ray Palmer telling the story of how he was warned as a child of a dangerously rocky gorge near a waterfall in his home town that he could now safely dive into because he was action figure sized. It's a nice human moment, but also has this weird meta quality of making The Atom feel like a trifling figure in a shallow pool. Three pages of story are devoted to Potter's Gorge, as Ray somehow fails to recognize that the low-flying bird he bounded out of the water to ride is in fact a very large and muscular man with a bird-themed helmet who co-starred in the same comics as Atom's for decades. It makes Ray look incredibly dense in a non-white dwarf matter way, and Hawkman having his honor wings ripped out of his helmet for the entire appearance does him no favors either.

I read the Shadow War of Hawkman mini-series, the one-off special that followed, and about half a year into the ongoing series before losing interest. That volume of Hawkman last one issue less than Power of the Atom, so I wasn't the only reader who felt that way. I would have benefited from a few pages of recap of the Hawk's Shadow War and the resolution I'd missed. We got three pages of recap alright-- but of the previous Atom issues instead. Apparently, all those Hawkman fans that powered a whole seventeen issue run a year earlier would require orientation on the four glacially paced stories of this run, as if there was no crossover between the Hawkman and Atom audiences. What's worse is Hawkman keeps talking about all they'd lost and how ashamed they were of their home world of Thanagar, without readers ever being context of what events led them to that state. Frustration and apathy were probably not what the creators of this title should have been shooting for.

Ray Palmer's life was a mess of his own creation because he'd outed his double life most publicly, and he was seriously considering taking the C.I.A.'s offer as their agent under a new identity. Hawkwoman especially thinks its a terrible idea, as the couple had just broken ties with an authoritarian regime that they'd disagreed with. At least, that's what I could gather from the context in the dialogue. Anyway, the Hawks had been staying at a friend's place in New Orleans while on vacation from having a title, though they were appearing in Justice League International by this point. It would have been a really good idea to discuss their experiences with the JLI, but everyone gets distracted by their room getting tossed by crooks. Among their missing belongings were their melee weapons and a pair of spare flight belts.

In this incarnation, the Hawks were sleuths who'd once had a perch in Detective Comics, but here they just follow the energy signature on their belts. You'd think we'd get some aerial combat with crooks wearing the belts, but when the Hawks locate the thieves, a positive-gravity trap is sprung instead. Their old foe I.Q. had planned the whole thing as a booby trap, but had not reckoned with their having the Mighty Mite in tow. Despite his advanced technology and presumed high intelligence, the Tiny Titan suckers I.Q. into damaging his own equipment and leads him right into the Hawks' custody. Even though I.Q. dressed like a dandy pre-World War II aviator, I'm still going to claim this as another case where the Atom fights dudes with weapons in street clothes.

Cut to another page of mildly homoerotic foreshadowing of disgraced former president Tricky Dick Nixon and his lumbering houseboy planning a confrontation with the Atom. Cut back to our heroes, also in casual wear, just spending the day together. Shayera Hall and Ray Palmer are a couple of jokesters gently ribbing unyielding rigid straight man Katar Hol, and that's the best part of the book. Ray expresses that the Halls' open cooperation and understanding is in sharp contrast to his own failed marriage, and that as part of his desire to emulate their healthier lifestyle, he would also try to do the work of navigating his new life as a public figure. Frankly, as expected, the combination of the Atom and the Hawks as old friends was greater than the sum of the parts of another low stakes outing in this title.

Chronos,Hawkgirl,Hawkman,Ray Palmer,POTAcast,Power of the Atom,Power of the Atom Podcast,Post-Crisis,

Power of the Atom Podcast #605

Skulduggery

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• The Atom in DC Bonus Book #8!
• By Joe Calchi, Jim Balent, & Dan Schaefer!
• From DC Comics's November 1988 cover-dated Power of the Atom #4!

Comic books were pretty much all anthologies in the early days, and very nearly entirely staffed with new and unproven talent. After all, it was a new and unproven medium. Once the industry got some successful properties under its belt, they got a little pickier about who got to do what. A lot of art was produced by studios back then, so an assistant could train up to a larger role on a more successful feature. The price of comics stayed the same for decades, so they got smaller and smaller for the same dime, with fewer opportunities for younger, unpolished talent. Most typically, they landed in the oldest type of comics, the anthologies; usually horror, romance, or some other genre that allowed for short stories or rotating creative team on done-in-one tales. Truth to tell, the tendency to use less desirable creatives on anthologies probably helped destroy the viability of that format going into the 1980s. DC still wanted to have a farm team, but with anthologies dying off, they had fewer avenues to developing talent in house and in print. Ultimately, the '80s indie comics boom subsidized small press feeders where the Big Two publishers could cherry-pick from other publishers' best prospects. In 1988 though, DC still had that nursery club mentality, and tried to facilitate it through their Bonus Book program.

The New Teen Titans was arguably DC's biggest success story of at minimum the early '80s, and it launched with a 16-page original preview story given away as a bound-in premium with DC Comics Presents #26 at no additional cost. DC tried to replicate that hit formula throughout the first half of the '80s to no avail. Then DC took two failures and tried to mash them up with 1988's Bonus Book program. Put simply, they'd try-out green talent in the free bonus stories, and hope that the added value would help sales on a given book while potentially offering exposure to the next great talent find. Rob Liefeld was the biggest name to come out of the program, but he'd already been producing work for Megaton Comics, and was already booked for the Hawk and Dove mini-series the month after his Jennifer Morgan solo story ran in the low-selling Warlord title. The next biggest was Jim Balent, the oldest rookie in town. He'd been kicking around the industry since 1984, failing to catch on with back-ups in DC war titles. He spent most of the late '80s doing heavy metal inspired cheesecake and splatter covers for Malibu titles, and the odd assignment for First or Dark Horse; just another one of those guys who seemed to spend too much time on a gigantic stylized signature. He finally started getting traction with the 1990 vampire series From The Darkness, which survived multiple volumes and publishers on his now trademark blend of buxom babes and gothic fantasy adventure. That gave him an in for the Batman family of titles, which led to his 6 1/2 year run on Catwoman, his moonlighting at Chaos! Comics on Purgatori, and finally his self-publishing Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose for twenty-one years and counting.

In 1988 though, Balent was still lucky to do the occasional Ex-Mutants cover. No, I'm not taking a did at the X-Men franchise-- there was literally a franchise of post-apocalyptic titles that was the biggest hit Eternity Comics ever saw based mostly on infringing Marvel trademarks and the early work of Ron Lim. Marvel had the last laugh though when they stole Ron Lim and bought out Eternity's parent company. Like main series artist Dwayne Turner, Jim Balent was part of the generation who lost years of income in serve to the principles of the book How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way. In the 1970s, there were only three kinds of comics-- the good Marvel ones, Brand Ecch, and stoner comix with an x. Nobody wanted to drawn Brand Ecch, so scores of young artists tried to draw as much like John Buscema and John Romita as possible with an over-emphasis on realistic anatomy, perspective, and background. The Marvel house style was a more dynamic take on standard issue commercial art, and it was as rigidly applied in the Bronze Age as DC's clinical Swandersonization in the Silver Age. The alternative was '70s Jack Kirby, and nobody was buying that. The tyranny of the Marvel Way was so fascistic that every artist on the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe was inked by Josef Rubinstein to make sure they looked uniformly "right." Neither Turner nor Balent garnered fans until they threw off those shackles and got jiggy with it, as was the fashion of the coming times.

While Turner probably had more "correct" fundamentals in 1988, Balent had a lot more energy and fun going for him, even considering how dodgy and crude his work was on the Atom Bonus Book. Balent is really a poor man's amateurish version of his future self, but there's an enthusiasm that patches over the rough patch that is every single panel of this story. Low rent and basic as the faux cover is, it still betters most of the actual run's, and the splash page of a human-sized Katarthan Skul-Rider on a giant bird crashing through the window of the Palmers' former suburban home at least rivals any other in the series. Writer Norman Brawler isn't who the yellow-skinned barbarian is looking for, but it's immediately odd that his main concern is more about Jean Loring than the former Atomic sword-wielder best known in Morlaidh. I talked too much on the front of this episode to now explain to a highly hypothetical young listener what a Rolodex is, so just know that it was equally weird for the barbarian to figure out how to find Ray Palmer via the analog version of Brawler's email contacts. It all seems to turn out to be a nightmare Ray's having anyway, though he was oddly upset about having slit the barbarian's throat, which isn't the Ray that you and I know.

The only part of the nightmare that wasn't real was Ray's victory, since Brawler was being taken out of his rental by EMTs after the Skul-Rider's attack. Given the rider's ranting, Ray's most concerned with Jean's safety, but she's incommunicado at that moment. Cut to day drinkers at a first class hotel heading back to his room for favors. When the male of the two appears to shrink in stature, the soon to be murdered female gently mocks his sudden shrimpyness. As blood ran down her limp wrist in the next panel, I have to figure someone was influenced by such woman-killing luminaries of the day as "The Death of Jean DeWolf" and Major Force introductory arc in Captain Atom. They sure knew how to brutally murdered women to the furthest extreme the Comics Code Authority would allow in the '80s, let me tell you. These cold chops were to bloody for the refrigerator, y'knowahmean?

Cal Thornton is maybe five feet as drawn, but the poor little rich boy is still so homicidally entitled that when the ur-generically named Labtech Research Incorporated can't guarantee their ability to keep adding a foot in length indefinitely due to his increasing tolerance of the experimental size-altering procedure, he goes all White Boy Summer on the world. Oh hey, you probably thought I meant that he got rapey. I can't say for certain that didn't happen, too. There's a lot of bedroom action at play in this story, but I should specify that this will primarily be grievance-based mass murder. I myself am technically a white boy, and this is kind of our thing, especially lately, but also the entirety of human history with all the colonization and genociding and stuff. Cal Thornton is the one man Mickey and Mallory of last chance YOLO spree killing, starting with blowing the scientist's head off with a Magnum and turning the dial up to "11" on full body girth enhancement. It turns out that he was Jean Loring's stalker ex before Ray Palmer, which tracks, until Ray beat him bloody, which also tracks. Ray is the Chad of advanced theoretical physics, let me tell you. Even though Cal only adds about a foot, his raptor steed Deodata gets into Them territory when it gets hit with Vita Rays.

Cal Thornton rides his bird to the penthouse apartment of his ritzy parents, changes into a robe and pajamas, bursts into their bedroom, makes his being slightly below average height the cause of all the world's troubles, changes clothes again, single-handed bare-handed Menendez-Bro'd his folks extreme Mo Howard style. Next morning, smears himself in yellow greasepaint head to toe, cosplays as a Skul-Rider, flies to Ivy University where Ray is teaching a class under an alias unconvincingly before being called out by a student. Cosplay Cal crashes class, Ray somehow shrinks them both plus the bird, and they all tumble into a replica of Mayan temples Ray was using as a teaching aid. We're running on Golden Age, Fletcher Hanks logic here. Just go with it. Ray flips the bird with a power cable. The fake Skul-Rider literally pulls the plug. We're not going to get into Skul-Rider feeling like a double entendre but doesn't make sense as such. That's a Sword of the Atom joke and we're already running long here.

The Atom doesn't buy the Skul-Rider act for a second and immediately makes Cal Thornton. This is the most realistic thing to happen in the Power of the Atom series to date. No amount of body paint is going to render your ex's creepy stalker unrecognizable, and you never forget an ass you kicked. Those are Hallmark moments in life. The fight moves underwater, and the Atom has to punch a fish. I'm not going to lie, being more exciting than 1988 Dwayne Turner is not actual very good in the grand scheme of things, and it was at this point that I had to go back a couple of pages to be reminded that this was not a local Ivy Town lake but the model in the classroom. Also, isn't it some form of animal cruelty to keep a common aquarium fish in the tiny sliver of actual water within a scale model of Mayan civilization in a college classroom. Balent's a good man who makes a point of drawing the water filtration system for that poor fishy.

Cal Thornton isn't as good a marksman as he thinks he is with a bow and arrow, plus when it comes down to swordfighting, the Tiny Titans does that density shifting thing that allows him to shatter Cal's blade. The Mighty Mite even breaks dude's arm in the same blow. Ray Palmer then threatens that he could execute this mother-murderer and no jury would convict him, but he's a civilized man now. That's code for they're both white guys. Cal Thornton was just having a really bad day, ya'll. Besides, it's not like he's literally an extremely rich madman who can hire the finest lawyers to get him the lightest possible sentence. He's only been nursing a homicidal grudge against Jean Loring and Ray Palmer since college. Why would the Atom see this Caucasian man as a more immediate and indefinite threat than a six-inch yellow guy from an opposing tribe who was probably only raiding New Morlaidh for rations whose body Atom dumped on a pile of corpses he personally delivered to Katarthan Hell five issues back.

Wow, the art has gotten really bad by this point. Like, printed locally so you have to buy a few pity copies to collect dust on the most poorly lit and remote part of the comics rack bad. Yet somehow still better than looking at Dwayne Turner's creepy weird disproportionate talking heads on supporting characters. Also, this is scripter Joe Calchi's second and last Bonus Book and also book full stop which operates on sometimes literally dream logic and I'd still rather read his Power of the Atom over what Stern's offered so far. I'll take insanity over numbing predictability, plus the only flashback is actually necessary and provides new information. File "I wish this mainstream comics series had the creative team from Ex-Mutants instead" under sentences never before uttered. I bet Ron Lim would have been a blast on the Atom.

Random fact, I think Joe Calchi went on to become General Manager / Advertising Director for Southern Jersey's Daily Journal and the Courier-Post. All thanks to his DC Bonus books, I'm absolutely certain. Sword of the Atom,Ray Palmer,POTAcast,Power of the Atom,Jean Loring,Power of the Atom Podcast,Post-Crisis,

Power of the Atom Podcast #604

15 Minutes of Fame!

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• The Atom versus Strobe!
• By Roger Stern, Dwayne Turner & K.S. Wilson!
• From DC Comics' October 1988 cover-dated Power of the Atom #3!

What looks to be a middle aged white dude with a chip on his shoulder managed to get a golden armor described as "looking like a high tech football player" starts robbing armored cars and such. Despite making off with half a million dollars, he's ticked because his time in the regional news is squeezed by the return of the Atom. Like an old west gunslinger, Strobe decides to make his name by taking out Ray Palmer, whose identity is publicly known. Consequently, Palmer and people associated with him are being hounded by a host of hyper-aggressive press. Despite checking into a hotel under an assumed name, the press were banging on Ray's door at six in the morning. Later, he has to rescue his old friend and mentor Professor Alpheus Hyatt from the same. But who will save the readers from a page-&-a-half of recapping the first two issues in some old man's kitchen?

On pages 6-7, the press gets to Jean and Paul Hoben on courthouse steps, and it's only then that they even learned Ray was back from the Amazon. You can tell on these pages that the artist is losing interest, because the already middling quality is going to an early Valiant WWF Wrestling comics place. It's page ten and we're still checking in with the C.I.A. spooks who have been surveilling Atom and jerking his chain. Comics like this are the reason the Chromium Age happened. Bland drawing of dull people in plain clothes talking about how they feel about stuff that happened in other bad comics. This is why comic books gave up on secret identities and supporting characters and lifelike subplots in favor of speed lines and Bondian villains with spikes and speedos. We were collectively so tired of comics like these that the only response was to demand hyperstimulation from kinky sexualization and extreme violence.

So halfway through the book, the Atom finally gets in a fight with a lameoid named Strobe on a suburban lawn. The dude create bright light bursts and concussion blasts. The Atom beats him twice, because while he was getting tied up the first time, he blinded everybody with a, y'know, his thing. Then Atom shrunk to climb into his equipment to disable it. The Atom couldn't just sock a guy named Strobe and be done with. He had to get extra with Strobe. Oh, and an older middle-aged guy getting a massage watches on TV and plots his own attack against the Mighty Mite. To the degree that the artist can do likenesses, which is not up to the standard of early Valiant WWF comics, I guess he vaguely resembles Richard Nixon if you're not wearing your glasses and are a little tipsy. Excited yet?

Agent Bailey, an even older late middle aged white guy with white hair, where he has any at all, gives Ray Palmer a call at Professor Hyatt's house. Making no connection, Ray happily shakes the hand of the C.I.A. creep who's secretly been messing with his life as he's offered a new identity and position within the agency...

Ray Palmer,POTAcast,Power of the Atom,Jean Loring,Power of the Atom Podcast,Post-Crisis

Power of the Atom Podcast #603

"Just Like Starting Over"

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• The Atom returns to super-heroing!
• By Roger Stern, Dwayne Turner & K.S. Wilson!
• From DC Comics' September 1988 cover-dated Power of the Atom #2!

We all agree that Ray Palmer would have hated John Lennon, right? I figure Ray's one of those "I'm not into music" people, or maybe a jazz guy, like Julie Schwartz. Anyway, the C.I.A. is put out by how the vast majority of information they have on Palmer came from his biography, and how those Justice League guys are really good about hiding their identities. Meanwhile, three-foot-Ray got checked out by family doctor Alvin Jeffries, who gives him a half-sized bill of health, excepting the shrinkage. Ray had a lens sizer that he'd developed with the Hawks secreted into a wall, but it didn't work in his current predicament. With a bit of time to kill, Ray perused Norman Brawler's leftover magazines to catch-up with the times. He was surprised to learn about the Legends event where a demagogue temporarily turned the population against their super-heroes. Also, the Hawks' identity had been publicly exposed, but their whole existence would get retconned soon, so no big loss there.

The next day, Ray and Norm visited Ivy University to meet with the newly named Associate Professor of Physics, Dr. Enrica Negrini. She had once been Ray's lab assistant, and the envy of all the ladies on campus, but Ray only ever had eyes for Jean. Ricki ran some tests and determined that Ray's body had been impregnated with white dwarf matter and the remains of his old costume. Ray stayed in her lab alone overnight to work on his problem, and determined that he could use intense bio-electric activity on his brain's frontal lobe via an encephalo-cybernetic web in a revised costume to merge with his old one and regain his lost mass. It's weird that they would specifically reference a method that would require that Ray wear a skullcap mask when they new his new costume for this series would air out his top. The other ill-considered alteration to his classic suit was explained by Norm messing up the dye pigments, and Ray not caring if it was pink and green so long as it fixed his powers. Part of what made the original suit so great was that he was the rare hero who wore full pants and that the points on it indicated forward motion for an always acrobatic character. The new suit emphasized his crotch in panties that now seemed to point all the way up his chest. Seriously, the worst thing about this book forever shaking DC's faith in the Atom as a solo character is that the best thing about the entire property is the costume and they haven't stopped messing it up for a fourth straight decade and counting.

The revised suit work in restoring Ray's height, but he immediately passed out from being up for something like 36 hours straight to get it done. Ricki volunteers to sit watch over this handsome man while he slept, until he was roused by an alarm. Quraci terrorists had taken hostages in the library, and the campus was being evacuated. The Atom reflexes went straight there, and because these are swarthy Middle Eastern types, he tries to manipulate them by pretending to be Allah and a genie, in that order but interchangeably. It doesn't work on all the terrorists, but it does on some, so go ahead and shake your head at the Bill Maher of it all. At least the Tiny Titan managed a decisive victory against numerous men with sub-machine guns, even if this is the second issue of the Mighty Mite fighting plain dudes.

In the end, it turns out the C.I.A. had tipped off the terrorists that Amir Lashgary, nephew of the late President of Qurac, had been pursuing a graduate degree at Ivy U for two years under an assumed name. The spooks had endangered all those lives solely to draw the Atom out of hiding, and none of us batted an eye. Later, to help sell the dud duds, we learn that the new costume will remain visible at full height, can disappear or reappear at will, and the Atom's neurological connection to the costume makes his powers more responsive than ever. He'll needed it, since the Amir respected Atom's request for discretion regarding his rescue, but the C.I.A. leaked Atom's return to the media to put pressure on the hero...

Ray Palmer,POTAcast,Power of the Atom,Power of the Atom Podcast,Post-Crisis

Power of the Atom Podcast #602

Home Is the Hero!

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• The last Ray Palmer Atom ongoing series begins!
• The destruction of Morlaidh!
• The conclusion of Sword of the Atom!
• By Roger Stern, Dwayne Turner & K.S. Wilson!
• From DC Comics' August 1988 cover-dated Power of the Atom #1!

Ray Palmer's last bid to star in his own ongoing series is launched off the back of the bird he was riding before colliding into three nondescript men with handguns. He's still in a variation of his classic costume, aside from having the open hair mask from his Sword period, though we know from the Secret Origins cover and promotions that he will soon duplicate Superman from the waist down. I suppose it's a dynamic cover for what it's depicting, but it doesn't seem like readers were buying what was being sold here in 1988. Actually, it wasn't selling in '68 or '78 either. In POTA's defense, nobody's out there swiping Jackson Guice's Flash #1 cover, either.

The splash page has more punch but less fanboy-friendly detailing, as Atom burst out of a rotary phone in an explosion of plastic and speaker parts. Ray then grows to about half his normal human size and his costume disappears. The call answerer was Norman Brawler, the author of Ray Palmer's authorized biography, who is to Norman Mailer as this comic is to the books it was being sold as emulating. Theoretically, Ray had gotten messed up be traveling through a satellite signal rather than his usual land line, but he was a short, sweaty mess who swiftly passes out.

A few hours later, Ray gives Norm the first chapter of his next biography. Well, given that this is Ray's last solo series, probably just a updated and expanded edition of The Atom's Farewell. They should also add an "s" to plural "Farewell". In case you missed it, they recap the present day material from Secret Origins #29 where Ray finds the white dwarf matter in the Amazon Jungle. Ray discovers that the material is "psycho-sensitive" at close proximity, and that was how Ray had "willed" himself to survive size-changing where the objects he tested in his early research just exploded.

Soon, full-sized human Don Brice stumbled into the shrunken barbarian kingdom of Morlaidh where the Atom's been swording and promptly died. Ray knew Brice as one of his C.I.A. contacts from the old days, and took seriously his warnings of a coming threat. I bet the dying part really sold it. Anyway, the Atom mounts a birdy and flies off to survey the area, and finds a base camp where random dudes are planning to napalm the rain forest. It's night time, so nobody's going to be doing anything until daybreak, at least. The Atom wisely, sabotages the napalm supply, returns to his kingdom, and swiftly crafts a device that uses the white dwarf particle to grow himself and the alien Karathan race that he's been living amongst.

Oh, that's not what happened? The Atom just landed on a meeting room table in a sweaty tent at six inches tall and yells at Portuguese-speaking workers in English? They can't understand his intent and react especially badly to his chopping at them with a sandwich sword? The Atom decides to investigate the napalm launching device while he's being actively pursued by a cowardly and superstitious lot with itchy trigger fingers? The napalm supply explodes and consumes the entire area? The Atom is knocked out and survives by landing in mud? He wakes up hours later to find New Morlaidh razed, with no survivors and a bunch of Karathan remains unidentifiable as, say, his comrade Voss or his lover Princess Laethwen? Is the titular "Power of the Atom" the ability to get everyone you know killed indirectly as a result of your actions while you do literally nothing to help and aren't even an active participant in your singular, personal salvation?

The one thing the Atom is able to salvage after days sifting through the physical evidence of his abject failure is the white dwarf matter, which he shrinks to tuck into his glove. It takes him days at six inches to reach civilization, which leaves him in a delirious state akin to that "Tales of the Black Freighter" dude. In the second most unlikely coincidence in human history, the Atom accidentally walks into a police station where the main guy from the rainforest clearing camp is the first person he sees. Ray picks another fight with a bunch of armed Brazilians that only leads to his wrecking havoc and fleeing the business ends of their pistols. This time, he finds a rotary phone in an office and calls the first number he can think of-- his biographer that he only met in the first Sword of the Atom Special. Also, Norm bought Ray's old house from Ray's ex-wife at a good price when she moved to Shopton after Ray lost it in the divorce settlement that Ray triggered when he completely abandoned his wife for the Princess that he also just lost. I'm thinking Roger Stern learned a lot of wrongheaded lessons from "Born Again," not the least being that we already knew that he wasn't Frank Miller from how laughable it was when they tried to sell Power of the Atom as being on a par with Batman stories we're still talking about decades later. Actually, the ironic part is that even DC knew better, because they left "Year One" off the Atom ads.

Because we haven't made Ray Palmer look bad enough so far and robbed the story of most of its impact by telling it in flashback, the Atom costume and white dwarf material get lost in the carpet somewhere Ray and Norm can't find it. Also, it looks like maybe the C.I.A. engineered this whole thing, and the Atom predictably jumped through every one of their hoops. Ray is still at child size like Scott Lang in that lame Ant-Man sequel and gets mad at how badly he's screwed everything up that he breaks the fireplace with his otherwise futile punch of frustration. So hey, the not-as-Tiny-as-usual-Titan got super strength. You totally want to buy this guy's book because he's got the totally unique power of super strength now, right?

Ray Palmer,POTAcast,Jean Loring,Sword of the Atom,Power of the Atom,Power of the Atom Podcast,Post-Crisis

Power of the Atom Podcast #601

The Secret Origin of the Atom

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• Soft launch of the mild old direction Post-Crisis Atom!
• Debut of new creative team of Roger Stern, Dwayne Turner & K.S. Wilson!
• From DC Comics' August 1988 cover-dated Secret Origins #29!
• Longer take with Ryan Daly on Secret Origins Podcast #29!

We pick up where we left off in the Sword of the Atom mini-series and specials with Ray Palmer trapped at six-inch size in the Amazon Jungle. By the least convincing coincidence in human history, the Atom happened upon an alien kingdom made up exclusively of a yellow-skinned but otherwise perfectly humanoid race of exactly the same relative dimensions! And we know they're anatomically correct because Ray has been serving as consort and protector of Princess Laethwen, with both jobs clearly involving sword-wielding. The kingdom of Morlaidh is stuck in barbarian times, so Ray Palmer will have to cut a b* just to get by. Ray is in that "Big Chill" phase of his life, so he gets all Richard Dreyfuss in Stand By Me, recalling pivotal moments in his childhood. His passion for science and adventure were both sparked by his reading the famous Edgar Rice Burroughs Carson of Venus and the obscure yet highly relevant Gardner F. Fox "Alan Morgan" series of books. Ray's parents supported his love of exploration, and even when his daddy died young, his surrogate father was famed archeologist Ted Ralston.

Ray's barbarian buddy Voss finds a bit of the white dwarf matter from the alien starship that theoretically shrank his race. The Atom performs a feat of strength in picking up the rock through density control or something. Ray gets it back to his makeshift lab and enbiggens the rock, assuring himself that he could grow himself and potentially even Morlaidh to regular human size. This causes him to think back to the first episode of this podcast, but with worse writing and art. There's a few unnecessary tweaks that grate, plus we keep seeing the neophyte artist go back to the same basic, static layout of Atom recounting his origin to Laethwen and Voss.

Ray reminds everyone that he never became a super-hero to help people, but just to clear away an obstacle in talking his girlfriend Jean Loring into finally marrying him instead of focusing on her law career. He's self aware enough to recognize the fallacy of their yuppie "I can have it all" ambition, but not enough to realize that he still treats women like prizes to be won. Let's be honest, this whole reverie is because he's getting bored with going native among the yellow-skins in a jungle, which gives me '80s media flashbacks of 'Nam flashbacks. Also, the Atom got off on the super-hero action more than his eventual wife, which is why he deuced on her the minute she was found in the arms of the other man Ray's neglect drove her to in the first place. The whole Conan shtick was his divorced dad midlife crisis.

While the Atom continues to tell the two people who will listen all about how awesome he was in the Justice League of America, a bunch of aliens indistinguishable from the ones Atom hangs with attacks. Because they're on the opposing side, Atom still regards them as savages and stabs them in the neck. Seriously, the sword of the Atom aims for the jugular again and again on-panel, almost as if he has no regard for these people's lives, at least not until there's a pile of gross bodies that he asks his yellow people to cleaning up for him. Former super-hero, yes. "Good guy" maybe not so much, unless you're using the term euphemistically.

The story ends with Ray Palmer paternalistically weighing the fate of Morlaidh and decided that everyone can stay shrunk until he decides otherwise, since they don't entirely believe his stories and he's not offering them a choice anyway. At least the hypersexualized Laethwen offers this sword a scabbard, as it were. "This is not the end! Watch for the further adventures of The Atom in an all-new series... on sale next week!" DC Comics pushed the new series pretty hard in house ads, trade magazines, and a store poster that compared it to its recent successful reinventions of Superman by John Byrne, the Flash by Baron & Guice, Wonder Woman by George Pérez, and the Justice League by Giffen, DeMatteis, and Maguire. Boy, I'm sure that direct comparison to watershed books will not end up biting the Tiny Titan's little red butt... Ray Palmer,POTAcast,Jean Loring,Sword of the Atom, Power of the Atom,Power of the Atom Podcast,Post-Crisis