September 1967: From Tiny to Titanic

Early on, I realized that on subatomic worlds, the Atom could as easily become a giant as a tiny hero. So I was pleased to see writer Gardner Fox and artist Gil Kane explore that possibility in The Up and Down Dooms of the Atom (The Atom 32, Sept. 1967).

Paralyzed in a scientific accident, Ray Palmer recovers his power of movement by shrinking to a subatomic world where he finds a cure for his malady even as he stops the subjugation of the Palond tribe by the savage Honds.

“A giant Gulliver Atom in the land of Lilliput!” wrote Texas reader Don Akers. “Quite a contrast to the normal Lilliputian properties Atom himself assumes! It’s different! I like it!”

Such one-note superheroes require versatility. The Atom used size in the way the Flash used speed, developing all sorts of uncanny applications for his power. 

“Great use of size and spatial relations,” noted comics historian Matthew Grossman.  “Another aspect of the character which I think makes him unique is that his abilities simultaneously make him powerful and vulnerable — he can ride through telephone wires but water-filled sinks are a potentially deadly menace! The nature of Atom’s abilities requires intellectual planning by the hero to overcome challenges, which I’d say more than most firmly puts him in the Silver Age ‘scientific adventurer’ mold.”

The Atom could have spent a lot of time exploring such subatomic worlds, but he didn’t, as comics historian Michael E. Grost observed.

“(Editor Julius) Schwartz had two science fiction magazines for which Fox frequently wrote,” Grost noted. “Mystery in Space tended to deal with stories set in outer space, while Strange Adventures tended to be based on Earth, and have tales grounded in daily life. There is something of a similar dichotomy between Fox’s two science fiction series for Schwartz, Adam Strange and The Atom. Adam Strange was set on another planet, while the Atom was set on the daily life of Earth.”

March 1967: Doubling Atomic Action

Attempting to stop a mysterious purple-clad criminal from stealing valuable bookends, the Atom is shocked to see the thief disappear through a portal to Earth-Two.

The super-villain turns out to be the Thinker, an archenemy of the Flash since 1943. He’s upped his game since then with a “thinking cap” that stimulates his brain, increasing his intelligence to genius level.

“I’ve also managed to increase its sidereal powers so that the creative centers of my brain are tremendously hyped up!” he thinks. “Now I can generate any amount of telekinetic energy …  enabling me to mentally create actual objects and people (that) will act as I command.”

The gloating Thinker believes he’s committed the perfect crime by robbing on one planet and then escaping to another — until TV news informs him of the startling fact that “the Thinker” has also stolen rare bookends on Earth-Two!

That mystery is the springboard for a satisfying Gardner Fox yarn, The Thinker’s Earth-Shattering Robberies, in The Atom 29 (March 1967). Handsome Gil Kane/Sid Greene art enhances this first team-up of the Golden Age and Silver Age Atoms.

The younger Atom had previously teamed up with Hawkman (Case of the Cosmic Camera!, The Atom 7, June 1963), the Flash (The Challenge of the Expanding World!, The Brave and the Bold 53, April 1964) and the Metal Men (Revenge of the Robot Reject, The Brave and the Bold 55, Aug. 1964). 

The Thinker had earlier faced the original Earth One/Earth Two doppelgängers — the two Flashes — while teamed up with the Fiddler and the Shade (Flash of Two Worlds, The Flash 123, Sept. 1961).

The influence of the Batman TV shows can be seen in the prominently displayed sound effects and Al Pratt’s “Atomobile.” I liked it. A true “convertible,” it switched instantly from ordinary car to super-vehicle. 

Another Golden Age superhero, the Sandman, was also sporting a “Sandcar” around this time, but that vehicle dated back to Adventure Comics 76 (July 1942).

November 1966: The Atom Gets Into a Cat Fight

I have a special affection for DC’s Atom stories. The Atom’s singular powers put him in a position that had its own special appeal. 

He could travel in time, into subatomic worlds or instantaneously through telephone lines, but he could also slug it out with the kind of masked criminal gangs who kept the Dynamic Duo busy. Because of his small stature, even cat-costumed thugs could pose a credible threat against him.

“When the Atom discovered that he could retain his full 180 pounds even at peewee size, he also became an impressive action hero, bouncing off rubber erasers and wafting on breezes, then increasing his weight and driving his tiny fist into a crook’s jaw,” noted Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones in The Comic Book Heroes. “That was a godsend to Gil Kane; after years of DC pussyfooting with physical combat, editors were finally getting bold enough to let him strut his gift for action. Murphy Anderson’s inking, though, gave the violence a tidy, everyday flavor that accented the charm of the Tiny Titan.”

“Another aspect of the character which I think makes him unique is that his abilities simultaneously make him powerful and vulnerable,” Matthew Grossman observed. “He can ride through telephone wires, but water-filled sinks are a potentially deadly menace! The nature of Atom’s abilities requires intellectual planning by the hero to overcome challenges, which I’d say more than most firmly puts him in the Silver Age ‘scientific adventurer’ mold.”

Beauty and the Beast Gang (The Atom 27, Nov. 1966) was a human interest story with superheroes. Ray Palmer’s shy friend, photographer Willie Farr, is hoping to take shots that will help his secret love, lonely Ivy Town secretary Dawn Hudson, win a beauty contest. But one of his infrared photos accidentally reveals the identity of a member of the masked Panther Gang, putting Willie in danger and getting the Atom involved. The Tiny Titan catches the criminals while managing to play Cupid.

September 1966: This Looks Like a Job for Spiritual-Magnetic Attraction

In Justice League of America 47, writer Gardner Fox was undoubtedly aware of the thematic similarities between Solomon Grundy and Blockbuster. He’d created one of them and scripted the other. 

The swamp zombie Grundy and Blockbuster, DC’s version of the Hulk, were both super-strong, dim-witted brutes who had an idée fixe about a superhero — Green Lantern in Grundy’s case, Batman in Blockbuster’s.

Fox created Blockbuster for The Blockbuster Invasion of Gotham City! in Detective Comics 345 (Nov. 1965). And he’d previously scripted Solomon Grundy, a character created by Alfred Bester, in All-Star Comics 33 (March 1947) and Showcase 55 (March-April 1965).

The spotlighting of a Batman villain is a signpost of the era. When you’ve got a giant Batman on the cover of the JLA, that means the Batman TV show has already premiered (in January that year) and is a big hit in the ratings. 

Once upon a time, the JLA tended to leave poor powerless Batman behind. No more. 

Still, this situation is something more than a utility belt can handle. Even when supercharged by Dr. Fate’s magic, the Spectre can no longer hold the two Earths apart. 

So who’s the only one who can help DC’s biggest superhero? DC’s smallest superhero, naturally.

Using his dwarf star technology, the Atom shrinks the Spectre down to an inch in size and then suddenly explodes him back into cosmic vastness, seemingly destroying the Ghostly Guardian in the process, but hurling the Earths back into their proper places.

Luckily, to the Atom’s surprise, the Spectre is able to reform himself.

“Though the psycho-matter of my spirit body was explosively flung to all corners of this warped universe, I still maintained control of its elements,” the ghost tells the Atom. “Just before I exploded the smithereens, I imbued my body with spiritual-magnetic attraction — so that no matter how far apart  it was flung, it would be drawn back to normal after a while.”

Glad he straightened that out.

December 1965: Things Go a Little Batty

Something must have seemed oddly familiar to Bruce Wayne, that day in 1965.

Only a couple of years before, he’d been accustomed to being changed into bizarre forms — a King Kong-like giant, or a baby, or an old man, or a genie, or a mummy, things like that. Then suddenly, in May 1964, all that stuff stopped.

Oh sure, since then some pallid telekinetic weirdo calling himself the Outsider had been attacking him with witches and animated Batmobiles and stuff, and his young friend Mark Desmond had been Jekyll-and-Hyding into a super-strong monster called the Blockbuster.

But other than that, things had been relatively normal.

Then, in Batman 177 (Dec. 1965), the old weirdness returned with Two Batman Too Many!, a story penned by veteran scribe Bill Finger.

As usual, the cover’s beautiful art by Carmine Infantino promised more than what would be delivered by the interior, which featured the increasingly indifferent art of Sheldon Moldoff.

The story spotlighted a giant Batman and a tiny Batman, explained away as clay homunculi brought to life by a shaman’s magic (an explanation that would have sufficed by itself in the pre-1964 era).

In fact, it was a scheme concocted by Batman to trap numbers racketeer and jewel thief Ed Garvey. The large and small Batmen were revealed to be the Atom and a well-padded Elongated Man — two other characters from the stable of Julius Schwartz, the editor who’d been tasked with revitalizing the Batman titles in 1964 by using fresher art and slightly more “realistic” plots.

October 1962: The Tiny Titan’s Time Trials

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.

September 1961: Those Thrilling, Time-Lost Titans

For the 10-and-under crowd, Showcase 34 contained not only the debut of a new superhero, but a thrilling surprise.

A text feature gave us our first glimpse of something we’d never heard of or suspected: a 1940s superhero team like the Justice League of America called the Justice Society of America.

The Spectre? Dr. Fate? Hourman? Sandman? Weirdly costumed alternate versions of the Flash, Green Lantern, the Atom and Hawkman? Just who were these tantalizing titans, anyway? Time would tell us…

The JSA’s founding members ranged from a crime-crushing ghost who was virtually omnipotent and a man who wielded a wish-fulfilling Aladdin’s ring to a stout, tough-talking matron whose mask was a pot with eye holes.

Also on the lower end of that power scale was a undersized college kid whose power was lifting weights — Al Pratt, the original Atom.

“Anyone who knows the Atom in his 1961 incarnation knows the two characters have nothing in common,” observed Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine. “I have said that DC used the old name, but appropriated the powers of Doll Man. Doll Man had been moribund since 1953, and then the publisher, Quality Comics, was sold to DC in ‘56.”

The Atom’s Silver Age makeover was a more radical revamp than the Flash, Green Lantern or Hawkman’s had been. The 1940s’ origins of the latter characters had been soft-peddled in their titles, but with the Atom editor Julius Schwartz clearly decided that a fuller explanation was in order.

The three-page text feature included background on the original Atom and the JSA, as well as mini-autobiographies on writer Gardner Fox and artists Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson.

“When my long-time editor Julie Schwartz presented me with the task of creating an ‘Atom,’  I began dipping into a memory that stores the faces of almost every movie star and bit player since the 1920s, and I decided on Robert Taylor as a basis for Ray (The Atom) Palmer,” Kane explained.

September 1961: Shrinking, But Not from a Fight

He was a superhero smaller even than the children who read his adventures, but nevertheless trickier and stronger than the irritating adults who told them what to do.

The formula had worked before, during the 14-year run of Doll Man in Feature Comics and his own title. So editor Julius Schwartz, writer Gardner Fox and artist Gil Kane redeployed it in the redesign and re-launch of their 1940s super-scrapper the Atom.

No longer an undersized college student with super strength, in Showcase 34 (Sept.-Oct. 1961), the new Atom was Ray Palmer, another of Schwartz’s and Fox’s space-age scientist-heroes dedicated to reason and education.

The first story in the issue told us, in leisurely detail, how an Ivy College physics professor acquired the power to shrink from dwarf star matter and used it to rescue trapped spelunkers.

The second story put him in costume and pitted him against one of those mirror-image foes so favored by superheroes — in this case a diminutive extraterrestrial teleporter named Kulan Dar who, when mentally enslaved by a criminal, resembles a genie from a bottle.

Palmer’s girlfriend Jean Loring doesn’t want to marry him until she’s established herself as a successful attorney, so the help the Atom frequently provides her on her legal cases isn’t entirely altruistic — he’s working to hasten the day when they can wed.

The first and most successful of Schwartz’s Golden Age superhero revivals, the Flash, worked up any number of crime-fighting tricks with his super speed, so the Atom played similar crowd-pleasing variations on the theme of shrinking.

While retaining his full-size strength, he could ride the winds by reducing his weight. The effective invisibility provided by his small stature proved useful to the CIA. The Atom could shrink into subatomic worlds, and even paradoxically appear as a giant there. His neatest trick was the ability to ride along on a telephone call, meaning that he could virtually teleport himself instantly to almost any spot on Earth.