Super-villains didn’t ordinarily rate a big build-up in DC Comics house ads, but Chronos the Time Thief got one for his debut in The Atom 3 (Oct-Nov. 1962).
With one or two notable exceptions, the Atom’s antagonists had up to then been fairly ordinary crooks. So editor Julius Schwartz’s spotlight on the caped and colorful — well, garish actually — Chronos may have been an attempt to begin to build for the Atom the kind of rogue’s gallery that had helped make the Flash popular.
Created by writer Gardner Fox and artist Gil Kane, Chronos was precisely the kind of concept-obsessed arch-criminal who was constantly turning up in the Scarlet Speedster’s Central City.
“The tale has a neat cover by Kane, showing the Atom in the watch, but the minor tale written around it is by the numbers,” observed comics historian Michael E. Grost. “Chronos is the sort of theme-oriented villain found more often in John Broome’s Flash stories: everything he does is related to time. Just as in Broome’s tales, we see the villain starting out as an ordinary convict, learning and obsessing over time, developing his persona, working as a watch repairman and horologist, etc. Broome does all this with a lot more pizzazz.
“Fox was always a lot more interested in his heroes than in his villains, which is not necessarily a bad thing! One can compare a far more successful tale written by Fox with a horologist hero: The Invisible Dinosaur (Strange Adventures 133, October 1961).
The issue also introduced an intriguing, popular running series about Prof. Alpheus V. Hyatt’s “Time Pool” — a time warp so small only the Atom could travel through it — in The Secret of Al Atom’s Lamp. The Ivy Town university setting of the Atom’s stories made it easy to drop technological innovations into the plot. This tale marked the second time in a handful of issues when a tiny super-scientific figure had been identified with an Arabian nights genie.
Michael Smith wrote: First read this story in a 100 page Superman Spectacular in 1971. Atom uncovered Chronos's real identity by identifying the bruise on Clinton's jaw where he had hit Chronos.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, I still remember my first exposure to the Earth-Two Atom in a JSA reprint, and thinking "why doesn't he ever shrink?" lol
ReplyDeleteRichard Meyer:
I remember this story as being quite clever… the villain actually darkens the bruise on his jaw to get Palmer to recognize him, but Palmer figures out that it’s makeup so he knows that the bad guy is laying a trap. And since he captures him as Palmer at the end, I don’t remember how or if he recovers his identity.
That, and the most garish villain costume I had ever seen! It made this dumpy-looking guy look quite sleek.
Bob Doncaster"
ReplyDeleteGarish! I’m wearing that same outfit as I write!
Cheryl Spoehr:
ReplyDeleteWhat bothered me about Chronos ,was that he was ONLY a danger to The Atom, I mean would Batman have trouble with tiny watch hands darting at him? His other problem is he was a CLOCK villain,not a TIME bad guy, he could not alter time,slow nor speed it,nor travel in it, he just had clock gimmicks. And yet,he was bad enough to fight the whole J.L.A. AND the J.S.A. along with five other bad guys in the first of the regular "Crisis" J.L.A./J.S.A. team ups....
I replied:
All good points. His "tiny traps" always seemed more than usually absurd to me.