An Atom and A Famous Writer

 

cover art by Gil Kane

We are still going through the reprints published in 1974's Detective Comics #439. This week, we come to "The Gold Hunters of '49," written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Gil Kane. It was originally published in Atom #12 (April/May 1964)

I love the time travel stories that Fox and Kane gifted us with during the 1960s. Ray Palmer a friend, Professor Hyatt, who has invented the "Time Pool," a small portal to the past through which Hyatt occasionally "fishes" for artifacts.

The Atom usually ends up going back in time as well whenever Hyatt uses the Time Pool. In this case, Hyatt is going to set his Time Pool for Baltimore in 1849. Ray wants to go back because he's reading a book published that year and wants to be find a missing page.  One of the things I enjoy about these stories is the casual motivations for time travelling they contain. Perhaps it can be argued, in a comic book universe, where there are any number of methods for time travelling, that this is understandable. "Heck, let Flash or Superman check out major historical events. I just want to catch up on my reading." It's the sort of Silver Age silliness that I can't help but love.

So Ray shrinks himself down and climbs through the portal, finding himself in a railroad depot, where a shipment of gold is being packed up for delivery to a bank. Since the bank is near a home where Atom knows his book is located, he hitches a ride.

But a mystery arises! The gold chest is empty, despite never being out of sight of Mr. Barr--the delivery guy. Barr finds himself suspected of the theft, so he asks his friend Edgar Allen Poe for help in solving the crime. Poe, though, has just gotten back in town and needs a nap while he investigates. Atom is interested in the crime as well, but this gives him time to find the book and read the missing page before Poe gets to work.

While reading, Atom has to stop a couple of thieves after some Shakespeare folios also located in the library. What follows is obviously filler--Fox's plot isn't quite enough to fill up all 12 pages. But it's fun filler. Any time Atom uses the "science" of miniaturization to beat up full-sized men, in a fight scene drawn by Gil Kane, it's worth seeing. 

When Poe does get to work, both he and Atom have pretty much already deduced what happened. The gold had been taken at the depot by the freight men, so Barr never had anything but an empty chest in his wagon. 

With some surreptitious help from Atom, Barr and Poe subdue the freight men. Atom returns to the present and Professor Hyatt bags a railroad time table from his fishing line. Everyone (well, everyone except the bad guys) is happy.

Kane's art, of course, looks great. Atom uses his powers in clever ways several times. And, as I mentioned, I love the idea of time travel being used for such relatively casual purposes. This is a fun story. 

Next week, we return to the lonely war of Willy Schultz. In two weeks, we'll look at a Golden Age Dr. Fate tale.

Miniature Knights Riding Bats!

 

Atom #22 (December 1965-January 1966) is wonderful. Writer Gardner Fox and artist Gil Kane have used Comic Book Logic to give us a story of miniature knights riding on bats. The world would be a poorer place without such stories.

The story begins with those knights (armed with electrified lances) breaking through a train window and zapping a courier carrying a fortune in jewels. And Gil Kane gives us a really effective panel showing the poor guy getting zapped. Ouch. You can feel his pain.

When he wakes up, the jewels he was carrying are gone and the window smashed by the knights is no longer broken. The poor guy can't get anyone to believe his story and he's arrested for stealing the jewels himself. 

Ray Palmer's girlfriend Jean Loring is assigned as the courier's lawyer and, through her, Ray learns of it. Figuring no one would make up such a story, he decides to investigate. As a resident of a Comic Book Universe where stuff like this happens all the time, this is quite reasonable.

Ray builds a device that tracks the sound of bat sonar and, as the Atom, manages to catch the knights in the act of robbing a bank. But he's outnumbered and, in the ensuing fight, knocked out. The knights get away with the money. The holes they made in the bank and the save have been repaired by the time Atom wakes up. 

Atom trys again, this time using a device that confusing bat sonar, leading them to a bell tower. He's rigged up a magnet to trap the knights through their metal armor, but they smash the magnet's power source. Another hand-to-hand fight ensues, but Atom fares much better this time. He hijacks a bat to even up the odds and ends up with a prisoner. 

In the meantime, we learn about the knights' backstory. There's lot of fun details to the story, but essentially there is a civilization of little people living in a cavern. A thug named Eddie Gordon stumbled across them and discovered that the echoing sound of a gunshot mesmerized them. By occasionally firing off shots to keep them under his sway, he's been able to launch a weird crime wave.

Atom learns about this from the captured knight, who has shaken off the mesmerism. The knight leads Atom into the cavern. Atom disarms Eddie, then helps him escape the now thoroughly ticked off little people.

It's a fun story from start to finish. Gil Kane's art especially shines during the bizarre Atom vs. bat-riding knights fight scenes, but the whole story is full of great imagery. 

Next week, we return again to the adventures of Travelin' Toughy.

Cover Cavalcade

 

A Gil Kane cover from 1966. Creepiest death trap ever. 

Cover Cavalcade

From 1967: A downright creepy cover drawn by Gil Kane.

Cover Cavalcade

Another great Joe Kubert cover, this one from 1969.

Phantom Doubles, Time Travel and Microscopic Heroes

It was still reasonably common in the early 1960s for superhero books to give us 2 twelve- or thirteen-page stories per issue rather than one full-length tale. This was not a bad thing at all. A lot of the writers working in comics at that time understood the short story format and consistently turned out some good stuff.

Atom at that time was written by Gardner Fox--perhaps the single most important writer in DC at that time. With a career that ran back into the 1940s, Fox was a veteran comic hack who could turn out fun stories based on any number of different characters. It was Fox who formed the JLA, who help craft the updated versions of many DC icons such as Flash and Hawkman, who created the idea of the multi-verse to codify how the Golden Age characters related to their Silver Age counterpoints. He did a lot of important stuff.

Fox's weak point was probably characterization--the superheroes he wrote about never really develop truly distinctive personalities. But he more than made up for this with his mastery of plot and story.

Atom #9 (November 1963) starts out with a radiation leak in Ray Palmer's lab. He loses consciousness for a moment while a phantom version of himself ("a radioactive emanation of Ray Palmer's life-force" is the brief explanation) comes into existence. When Ray regains his senses, he learns that thieves have stolen some equipment being delivered to his lab. He pursues the thieves, at first unaware that another version of himself is in turn chasing him with murderous intent.

The second story featured the Time Pool--a device invented by a friend of Palmer's that can send a magnet back in time to retrieve artifacts. The Atom often hitches a ride on the magnet just to help out with this somewhat bizarre form of research. In this instance, Atom ends up in Holland in 1609, where he witnesses the invention of the first telescope and helps explorer Henry Hudson escape from kidnappers.


Both stories are unpretentious fun. Told in a very economical fashion, they cover all the plot points one by one while still leaving room for some nifty action scenes.

And the fight scenes are what really make the story. The Atom was fortunate to have Gil Kane as his artist. Kane never drew an uninteresting panel in his life and his work here is infused with his typical energy. Whether Atom is pulling down on a thug's tie in order to bump his head against a second thug or playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek through desk drawers with his phantom double, it all comes across as tremendous fun.

Today, we often see story arcs that run through many issues--thus making them appropriate for being reprinted in trade paperbacks as a single epic tale. This is not a bad thing by itself--some stories should be epics. But it doesn't hurt to remember that there are stories that only need to be a few pages long to get the job done.