Endorsement: The Atom Project

There is a lot happening in the DCU right now. And, surprisingly... I endorse almost all of it, including...

The Atom Project.

The ostensible plot of The Atom Project is that Ray "The Atom" Palmer, as the classic JLA's premiere scientist, has taken on the task of fixing the Wacky Power Scramble caused when (in DC's latest universe-changing crossover) Amanda Waller's army of Amazos blew up, forfeiting (somewhat haphazardly) all the powers they had stolen.

Paired with his fellow "The Atom", Ryan Choi, Palmer is having limited success, but exposits that working with Nathaniel "Captain Atom" Adam is the key to unlimited success.

There are so many reason to dislike Captain Atom that the stupidity of the "Adam/Atom" thing is sometimes overlooked.

Why is Captain Atom the key?  I'm not going to bother to explain the in-story reason (especially since I don't understand it), but the meta-reasons are obvious. First, no one ever knows what to do with Captain Atom,  DC's red-chested stepchild from the Charlton Universe. Certainly he has no fans other than complain about his use/misuse/abuse.  Second, he's an angsty, volatile character, making him a perfect unstable platform for "the Atom Project" to teeter upon.  Third, he is, quite simply, a hero with "Atom" in his name.

Because, clearly, one of the longer-term goals of this miniseries to is creating an Atom Dynasty (that is, a dynastic centerpiece model build around Ray Palmer, an idea I have obviously endorsed for, um, some time.

After all, how could you possibly go wrong centering your world around Ray Palmer?

The real Atom (Ray Palmer), the "ethnic counterpart"/"junior partner" (Ryan Choi), the sidekick (Atom-Smasher), the black sheep (Captain Atom).  It's a solid start.  

Sure, I'd love to see the return of the mysterious Molecule, 

Who, despite being nameless and appearing in perhaps three panels total, seems to have more potential than Vixen, Voodoo, and all of Stormwatch combined.

smart'n'sexy Enrichetta Negrini, 

Objectively, if I OF ALL PEOPLE think a woman is too smart and sexy to go to waste,
then she damned well IS.

and the ultimate animal sidekick, the bionic Major Mynah.

I do not love Major Mynah despite the fact he's absurd.
I love Major Mynah BECAUSE he's absurd.

But all this point I'm just happy that DC sees Ray Palmer as deserving of dynasty and making the effort to build one.

The creators clearly set up Ray and Ryan as a bad science-cop/good science cop duo, or, more accurately, and cold and calculating scientist / sensitive and humanist scientist duo.  I'm not really sure this jibes well with their past portrayals but, let's face it: neither Ray Palmer nor Ryan Choi have (or ever had) sufficiently strong characterizations in the past to complain that this new interpretation of them is off-model.  On the whole, Ray has generally been noted only his outstanding level of confidence (even for a superhero) and his problem-solving nature.  

The amount of confidence required to casually, commandingly SLAP JEAN "THREAT TO ALL WHO LIVE" LORING in the face is far beyond my ken.

And Ryan Choi, well, I think his most consistent and identifiable traits are hero-worship and haplessness.

You're a physicist, Ryan. Don't do engineering, it's beneath you and you suck at it.  Do you try to do your own dry-walling, too?

So, for the time being, it seems a reasonable way of not only distinguishing the two Atoms, of making them not just non-redundant but necessary counterparts.  There aren't a lot of crimefighter duos in comics anymore and two Atoms just might be more viable than one (something the Flashes have never made work).

As long as they are assembling a world of characters around Ray Palmer, it begs the question, where, if anywhere, is Jean Loring?

Again--try to imagine the confidence. This woman eats a bowlful of Karens every morning for breakfast and then shits Yelp reviews.

Jean Loring was alive two or so years ago (in Cold Coast Asylum) but that was two years; how many times has the DCU been soft-rebooted since then? To my satisfaction, it has not really been established whether Jean Loring's long and storied history still stands in current continuity.  Is she still dead, eaten by sharks? Or has she NOT YET HAPPENED?!

AGAIN, try to fathom the degree of confidence required to propose to Jean "you vermin, I'll rip your face off" Loring ONCE, let alone FIFTY-SEVEN TIMES.

Oh, yeah. Let's get on that rollercoaster AGAIN, daddy!

Heroclix Sunday: Ray Palmer's Lab

Today on Heroclix Sunday we do a little something for the little hero with a big brain, Ray "The Atom" Palmer.

I only WISH I could look this gay.

Oops; wrong guy; that's one the large hero with the little brain and nobody's favorite hero, Captain Atom, seen here crapping out the world's largest lithium atom (which apparently has an extra capacious K shell!).

I mean this guy:

The one in the costume, not the hot naked one in the bottle.

Ray Palmer, who, although very much NOT the first shrinking hero or even the first 'The Atom", is definitely the most famous one.

Doll Man is the first shrinking hero and pre-dates Ray by over 20 years.

That's the first "The Atom", an extremely short Golden Age hero whose only power was his lack of a self-preservation instinct.

Ray was (is?) an academic, a physics professor and trained gymnast; he's terribly smart and weighs exactly 180 pounds.

We know this because it's mentioned in every. single. story.

Ray's whole schtick is (un)shrinking and that doesn't translate well into Heroclix.  Figures of Ray often have or can use the Tiny Symbol.

It's an atom, in his honor.

The Tiny Symbol does give a figure some advantages; it can be carried around by larger figures and gets +1 Defense against ranged attacks.  But that's it; it's kind of crappy. It's shared by shrinking heroes, small animals, and baby groot.

While other powers shrinking heroes have try to capture the usual advantages of size-changing -- stealth, the element of surprise, focused and unavoidable attacks--it doesn't capture at all the idea the two shrinking characters can battle on a complete different level that other characters can't access, walloping at each in a train set or a petri dish.

So I made a map for Ray that does.

It kind of matches his costume.

The right side is at our normal human scale.  The bottom part with red wood floors is the hallway and waiting room to the Nanophysics Department where Ray works. The middle part with blue carpet is the lounge/study where colleagues meet and relax. The top part with grey tile is the lab where experiments are conducted.

The left size, with the atom symbols, is a much smaller (1/64) scale.  It represents a 'zoom in' on any one appropriate square from the other side of the map.  A shrinking character can move from a square on the right side of the map to the corresponding part of the left side (leaving a marker on the spot they 'traveled from' to show where they are in the bigger picture).  Another shrinking character can go where that marker is and transfer over to the left side to following the first one.  There they can do battle ... or just use the left side as a way to travel to a new place on the right, unmolested by opponents who can no longer perceive them.  

You can't make such areas in every map and there aren't that many shrinking characters to take advantage of them anyway. But I thought Ray deserves a map of his own where he can do so and what better place than his own lab?

"I do not love thee, Captain Atom..."

Dear DC Comics,

No one likes Captain Atom.  

Not because you haven't tried to make us, though. DC has abandoned scores of interesting and at least mildly popular characters since the Crisis, including some with small but very passionate fanbases.  But DC never gives up on Captain Atom.  No matter how many times we do.

zzzzZZZZZZZZZwhu-huh-what?!
Nyeah, with great power comes great boredom, got it, got it.

And, oh, how you have tried!  You gave him a new origin.  You gave him his own series (more than once, I recall).  You put him in JLI,  You laughably made him the leader of all of Earth's superheroes during an alien invasion crossover.  And when the most recent Heroclix set, "Superman/Wonder Woman" was teased, five figures were shown: Superman, Wonder Woman, Superman foe Lex Luthor, Superman ally Krypto the Superdog, and... Captain Atom. OF COURSE. Because the kids, they ALL love Captain Atom.

"Whoa! I was going to pass on this set, because who wants clix of Superman, Wonder Woman, Lex Luthor, and Krypto. But CAPTAIN ATOM?!  Take my wallet!'
Said absolutely no one on earth.

"Captain Atom is one of the most powerful beings on earth!" "Captain Atom is potentially more powerful than Superman!" "Captain Atom is the model for Dr. Manhattan!' "Captain Atom has fewer cavities and 32% more whitening particles!"

Please stop.  It doesn't work.  We don't care how hard or how many ways or how many times you try to convince us we should love Captain Atom.

"Cary Bates! THAT'll fix the problem!"

Captain Atom is a tool. Or a traitor.  Or a dupe. Or a pompous ass.  Or a hothead.  Who cries when defeated by a pickle jar.  And we don't like him.

I just TOLD you what you were, Captain Atom; jeez, try to keep up.

Captain Atom doesn't have a dedicated fanbase. He doesn't have a fanbase at all. Even that ne-er-do-well hipster slacker poseur layabout Jack Knight has a fanbase. Even G'Nort has a fanbase.  There are NO Captain Atom fans.  There are, at best, a Set of People Who Didn't Mind Him All That Much in That One Thing They Saw or Read for Some Other Reason.  You want to know how unloved Captain Atom is?  He doesn't even have a Facebook fanpage. And if he did, it would be called "A Set of People Who etc."  

Plus,  the only remotely interesting thing he ever does is blow up.
 Even Captain Atom knows when he's not wanted. Why doesn't DC?

I get it. You paid good money for him at the Charlton yard sale and you want to get your money's worth.  Plus, he hardly had any wear and tear on him, so he should have lots of good use left in him.  You just keep trying him on with every outfit you have in the hope of finding the right one. But it's really obvious that that's what you're doing.  Captain Atom is not an organic part of the DCU.  If he didn't exist or you didn't own him, absolutely no one, writer or reader, would be saying, "You know, we need a character like THIS."

Captain Atom worked well precisely once, ten years ago, when he was trapped in the Wildstorm Universe, where suddenly he seems like a shining beacon of goodness and common sense in that effed up world. Whose characters, I note, you have since tried to incorporate into the main DCU, failed, and are now spinning back out into their own continuity, where they belong.

That should be a clue; give him another universe of his own.  He and Blue Beetle COULD be the Superman and Batman of a Charlton Universe.  You could spend your energies trying to have more than one potential movie franchise--,er, I mean, comic book universe going at the same time. it's worked well with Earth-2, hasn't it?  Run with that.

Adding insult, while you're spending all this time and effort pushing Captain Atom on us, you ignore The Atom, who everyone likes.  But that's a post for another day....

Can you answer "The Captain Atom Question"?

The “Captain Atom Question” concerns the incorporation of characters from pre-existing literary universes into another, larger literary universe, once their original universe is gone.  The question is: can this be done successfully?

My answer is essentially “no”.

Among the various literary media, this phenomenon is pretty much confined to comic books.  Comic book companies go defunct for various reasons and their intellectual property—their characters—get bought by another company.  

Usually this company is DC.  DC, you see, is a compulsive hoarder; “I could use that character some day!  I paid good money for that!  It’s going to come back in style just you wait and see!”  Occasionally, it reaches Crisis proportions and there’s an intervention where some nice folks from reality TV come in, negotiate to get rid of DC’s old crap by enticing it with new living room furniture (“There’ll be room for NEW characters, DC, sweetie!”), and clean house.  Then DC immediately starts filling the house with crap again.  Repeat cycle.

This, by the way, is in contrast to Marvel. It’s not a hoarder; it’s an obsessive-compulsive that spends all its time putting things in order.  It writes guidebooks that tell it how tall everyone is and classifies them by how much weight they can lift, sketches out all possible permutations of its universe with “What If?” stories, (“What if… Iron Man had had EGGS for breakfast?!”) and insists that all of its stories are part of one big *ahem* perfectly organized consistent continuity (despite any evidence to the contrary).  If DC is Oscar Madison, then Marvel is Felix Unger.

Sometimes even they get confused, however.

So, every time there is a publishing yard sale, DC goes out bargain hunting with a reticule full of one dollar bills and snaps up collections of old characters as if they were beanie babies.  The Shazam family of characters, the Wildstorm stable (the Authority et al.), the Milestone properties (Static, Icon, Hardware, Xombi, et al.), the Quality characters (Plastic Man, the Ray, Black Condor, Manhunter, Phantom Lady, the Human Bomb, Uncle Sam, Doll Man, the Red Bee), the Charlton heroes (the Question, Blue Beetle, Peacemaker, and Captain Atom, for whom this question is named)—all these are characters the DC acquired by lot at going-out-business sales.

With one possible exception—Blue Beetle—DC has tried repeatedly to incorporate all these characters in the DCU…and failed.  That exception was mostly confined to using Blue Beetle as comic relief, and even that success was spotty at best.

Other attempts to use such characters as comic relief have been mostly....
regrettable.

As a general rule, these imported characters simply don’t “take”.  Like transplanted plants, they simply can’t survive well enough outside of their native soil.  Back in the heyday of the Multiverse, DC seemed to accept this fact. Rather than try to bring these niche characters into the searing sunlight of the superfriends’ world, full of its  Underroo trees and constant crossovers, DC recognized them for the hothouse flowers they were and kept them isolated in their own hermetically sealed environment of alternate earths.   If the Freedom Fighters made sense in World War II, well, then, DC gave them an earth where WWII was still going on.  If the Shazams required talking tigers and worms to thrive, then give them a world that has them.

"Segregation now; segregation forever!"

You can try to claim that “DC just didn’t try hard enough because they didn’t care about someone else’s characters”, but I’m not buying it.  DC has repeatedly moved heaven-1 and earth-1 to get its readers to care about Captain Atom and consider him part of its pantheon, to no avail.  

Batman does NOT salute.  Let alone salute Captain Atom.

To incorporate Shazam, DC has tried a host of solutions, from surrounding him with every possible shiny toy from his homeworld, to aiming him at kids, to giving him several grim’n’gritty make-overs.  

Whatevs, Billy *eyeroll*.  Not even Geoff Johns can make you 'cool'.

I say that, for whatever reasons--call it vibrational frequency, if you will--such imported characters cannot work. Like transplanted organs they require great pain and effort in the form of constant editorial doping just to keep the host universe from simply rejecting them. So, perhaps, more precisely, it's not that they absolutely cannot work, but that the energy and effort required to do so is well beyond the point of diminishing returns from the character.

You are welcome to try to prove me wrong.

DC sure hasn't.

Atom Rant

Can we talk about Captain Atom today?

I'm no longtime Captain Atom fan. I mean, really; are there any? Captain Atom, like the most of his Charlton Comics brethren, is a one of the DCU's red-headed stepchildren. For writers as well as readers, it's been hard to figure out what he's like, let alone where belongs in the DCU.

If you want a sense of how far DC was from knowing who these characters were and who they wanted them to be, (re-)read Crisis on Infinite Earths. Could Ted Kord have been a less pleasant hero? "Can the telethon, pal; you got our donation. I'll join your gabfest." Could this person be less like the Ted Kord of the Blue Beetle series, let alone of the one of the JLI?

Captain Atom, on the other hand, was simply damned by faint attention. I read his own series for a while, but still never got a sense of his personality. As far as I could tell he was a Air Force officer but dumber than a grunt and the only sparkle he had was from his skin. He was Hal Jordan without the charm. Or the ceiling tiles.

But I learned to adore him when they sent him on his Grand Tour of the Wildstorm Universe. Out of the shadow of the DCU's mainstay icons, he truly shone (and not just because of his skin) like a beacon in the dark world of Wildstorm. He became more than a superhero for me; he became a hero. He was powerful, righteous, intelligent, resourceful, passionate, and reasonable. Most important, he was a tower of morality.

Until...

Someone remembered that he was supposed to be the bad guy in Zero Hour, before that surprise was spoiled by leaks and then abandoned (for a replacement patsy too ridiculous to be named). And so it was decided that he was to become Monarch (as he was supposed to have been the first time).

I was disappointed by the decision, but resigned to it. Because it they went to the trouble of shining up Captain Atom to new heights of herodom, the tale of his fall into universe-threatening villainy would surely be Shakespearean in its pathos.

Or, it could be COMPLETELY FRIGGIN' IGNORED.

Captain Atom goes from being the shining example of heroism in the Wildstorm Universe to a masticator of scenery and master organizer of a multiversal army of worldkillers? Because of....what exactly? Some trouble in Bludhaven? No; no I don't think so.

I want a better explanation, DC.

I demand one.