#also..making Dick cheat on A TALL ALIEN PRINCESS with a human is..crazy work like..???

[jennrypan]

"Dickbabs should've been here"

Under every Dick x Kori edit is EVIL. Cuz god dammit if you people don't shut the hell UP about Dick x Barbara. They are boring as hell together, sorry not sorry fuck off.

The ship kinda gets butchered when people keep shipping her with his actual dad. And Dick (and Barbara) needs someone that isn't connected to the Batfamily. RELEASE THEM god damn.

(Also after 3 jokers Barbara can kick rocks 🤷‍♀️ she wants to ride Bruce so hard she can keep him. Like yall will never convince me she's a better love interest for Dick than Kori cuz UGHHHHHHH. Let him be free. And let Kori be in more shit for fucks sake.)

[thebibliomancer]

11 Days of Comics! 1/11: The Atom Special #1 (1993) "Shrinking from the Past!"

Eleven sure is a random number. But I got a small pile of comics at an estate sale so might as well bring back the X Days of Comics! format.

And it might not be contiguous days. I'm up to all kinds of things these days that eat into my time. I'll just see what kind of pace I can comfortably keep up.

So the Atom Special kind of finds Ray Palmer the Atom in a weird spot.

He's estranged from all his friends and his ex-wife Jean Loring who all think he's a jerk, because he acts like a jerk. But also because his friends are all jerks. Jean cheated on him. And his pal Norman Brawler wrote a tell-all book exposing the Atom's secret identity.

Dick move.

Ray abandoned human civilization after his divorce and moved to South America to become the boytoy of a six-inch tall alien princess named Laethwyn and have tiny adventures.

Then the tiny alien colony is destroyed by the CIA in an attempt to persuade Ray to become a spy. So he shrunk the CIA squad down to tiny size.

Ray passes the Atom legacy to a new guy, Adam Cray. Who promptly gets himself killed working for Suicide Squad.

That's kind of a self-own. You don't join Suicide Squad for a long and prosperous career.

So Ray is the Atom again. He's doing Atom stuff, like fighting the Loaded Dice Mob. A bunch of old dudes in dice-themed duds.

But he also keeps seeing visions of his greatest regrets. The death of his dad. Jean cheating on him. Laethwyn burning to death because of the CIA. Adam Cray's death on the Suicide Squad.

And to top it all off, someone stole the tiny time portal from Ray's old friend Professor Alpheus V. Hyatt and planted a clock-face looking bomb in Hyatt's face.

Its seriously wacky for something so horrible.

The hospital wants to relocate Hyatt to anywhere else because they don't know how to defuse the bomb and don't want to deal with superhero shit. But Jean Loring and her new boyfriend Paul Hoben threaten to sue if the hospital tries to just make the professor someone else's problem.

Ray hears about it and plans to shrink down to defuse the bomb but after having an episode of seeing a vision of his dad dying in a hospital, the doctors decide he's way too unstable to be mucking around with a bomb.

Ray thinks that the visions and stealing the time portal could only be the work of Chronos, the Time Bandit. Because he's done the former before and stealing a time portal fits his wacky theme. But Chronos seems to be in a coma from the DC Invasion event.

So, instead, Ray spends some time tiny pranking his estranged friends and yelling at them to prove that he's not immature or crazy. He also spends time building a house out of atoms inside of a fork so he can withdraw from society.

Norman comes to yell at Ray but he sees all the trauma visions too, proving that they're not just in Ray's head.

Ray figures out that Chronos IS behind it, he just fooled him with an illusion of being in a coma! So he does a science to open a portal to the time portal and finds CHRONOS! AH HA!

But it was all a trap. Ray gets his tiny costume stolen off of him while he's tiny and Norman gets taken hostage.

It turns out that Chronos needed Atom's shrinking tech to get the best use out of the time portal, which is so tiny that only Atom can comfortably fit through.

Chronos demands Ray tell him how to use the Atom suit or else bad things happen to Norman. Ray pretends to give up to get Chronos to let his guard down and then tosses the time portal device through the time portal.

It lands in 15th Century France to the bemusement of a French aristocrat.

Chronos reaches through the time portal to try to get the device but accidentally pushes it off the table and breaks it. Shutting down the portal. With Chronos' arm still in it.

Whoops. And ouch.

The French lord is further bemused at the severed arm but takes the watch off it and declares it a good day.

What a silly bit character, this Frenchguy.

With the day saved and Atom's confidence back, he goes to the hospital and defuses the clockface face bomb and then kicks down his atom house.

He's not going to withdraw. He's going to live his life and spend time with his jerk friends!

And apparently get turned into a teenager by the Zero Hour event and form a new Teen Titans!

Comic books!

The Atom Special is pretty decent. Telling a story to try to get Ray Palmer back to some kind of normalcy with his supporting cast after however many years of living with tiny aliens or living under an assumed identity to avoid the CIA.

It uses elements from Silver Age Atom stories like Chronos and the time portal.

I have one of the black and white collections of old Atom stories. They were fun. Not sensational but fun. I think Atom had to clear the good name of a swan that had been framed for crime.

Atom got up to some wacky stuff.

Half the time he was only taking on cases that were relevant to his fiance's law career because he figured that if he helped her clear all her cases, she'd quit her silly career and marry him.

Iiiiiiiits not surprising that their marriage didn't work out. Honestly.

Chronos isn't that impressive as a villain. But having him be interested in the tiny time portal makes a lot of sense.

I don't know how much stuff happened in between this and Ray Palmer turning into a teenager and becoming leader of the Teen Titans. But this Special could be the last hurrah of Ray Palmer's Silver Age status quo.

I don't know if Ray got any other long-running books. Most of what I do know is that his life after this point is pretty dire.

Jean Loring goes a little murdery to try to win Ray back. When Ray finds out he exiles himself to a different dimension and is a big part of Countdown, to the chagrin of many.

So its nice that he got a story where he and his jerky supporting cast had a nice party at the end.

Its something, anyway.