Showcase #34 (1961)
by Gardner Fox & Gil Kane
When the Silver Age introduced a new version of the Flash and Green Lantern, they kept the basic ides of “guy who runs really fast” and “guy with a magic ring that does anything”.
But for the Atom, who in the Golden Age was just “short guy who is good at fighting”… they went into a completely different direction.
We begin with scientist Ray Palmer inventing a shrinking ray that causes stuff to blow up after a short time.
How unfortunate that there is no way to make something capable of creating explosions profitable.
It’s always weird to see comics mentioning the world population at the time of writing: it’s more than doubled in about 60 years.
The origin of the shrink ray is absolutely bonkers. Because while you might initially think it was based on some fictional material…
…but the fact that it’s based on a real thing is even more absurd: it’s a fragment of a white dwarf star.
If you’re not up with your astronomy, white dwarf stars are RIDICULOUSLY heavy.
I’ll get on that on a bit, because it’s probably the most absurd part of the story, but one fact that is often omitted when talking about this story… a white dwarf star is LITERALLY a star.
With an AVERAGE surface temperature of 10,000 degrees: that’s double that of the Sun!
I don’t even have to specify which degrees I’m talking about… and Ray is HOLDING A PIECE OF IT IN HIS HANDS.
But even leaving aside the temperature: do you have any idea how absurdly heavy that thing must be? If you know me, there’s no way I can resist attempting to guesstimate.
That piece is a bit larger than Ray’s hand, so let’s be very generous and say it’s twice the size of a baseball. A bit of research tells me that an official baseball would have a volume of 210 cm3; doubling the diameter increases that to 1,680 cm3.
(yeah I will do back-of-the-envelope calculations to determine the mass of a fictional star, but I draw the line at doing math with Imperial units)
White dwarf stars have a density of about 1,000 tons per cubic centimeters, so even with that charitable estimate: Ray Palmer is currently holding 1,68 million metric tons!!!
By comparison, that’s THE MASS OF A MOUNTAIN.
Also, white dwarfs are that dense because of the (literally) astronomic pressure caused by its gravity; if one did found its way to Earth, it would instantly expand and quite possibly disintegrate everything around it with a level of destruction I can hardly imagine.
Unless you cut and polish it into a lens, of course.
Ray really is determined to perfect shrinking technology: even after holding in his hand the rarest thing on the planet which he SOMEHOW managed to polish without destroying everything, he doesn’t even tell anybody what he found and immediately uses it to develop his new invention.
He’s just as determined to marry Jean Loring, asking her to marry him FIFTY-SEVEN times.
Notice the sign of the times: it’s just assumed that she’ll HAVE to give up her career as a lawyer once she marries.
Despite being smart enough to finish law school in just 2 years.
The couple leads a “nature club” into a hike that ventually ends up in a cave.
Who said comic books aren’t educational?
Well, anyone reading the white dwarf star panels, but let’s forget about those.
Too bad that the cave in unstable AND it slowly suffocates you.
In a small moment that I really appreciated, Ray not only worries about finding an exit but also makes sure the kids don’t panic.
Unfortunately the only way out the cave seems to be a very small opening.
Good thing Ray brought the lense with him, so of course:
Getting smaller has made him stronger. Sounds legit.
With the looming deadline of his inevitable explosion, Ray creates an opening.
But he conveniently doesn’t explode, thanks to some Liquid McGuffin dripping on the white dwarf star lens.
Or perhaps it’s something in Ray’s body itself? Whatever it is, he’s still the only one who can shrink without exploding.
That was the first story. We have a second one, where he does wear the Atom costume for the first time… and if you thought the Flash’s costume-in-a-ring was weird, it was nothing compared to this.
That’s right: the Atom is ALWAYS “wearing” an intangible and invisible costume that has been woven from white dwarf star material!!!
The Atom’s less discussed secondary power, which arguably is what makes him even more dangerous, is his ability to fully control his mass and weight.
I’m not really sure WHY his muscles are supposed to be as strong as he normally is.
In the story, the Atom fights an equally small alien who is after Europium, which does sound like a fictional element but it’s a real thing.
It’s the story that also introduces the Atom’s extremely unique, and incredibly awesome, way of travel: the phone!
Exactly how he does it is not shown in the story itself, but in a separate entry… was the Atom the one to introduce the concept of the text page as supplementary material?
The explanation goes into detail, but basically the Atom can travel through landlines because he can hold on to individual electrons!!!
Historical significance: 9/ 
The Atom will become an important part of the DC Universe, and most of the basics are already there.
Silver Age-ness: 1,680,000 /
I forgot to mention that THE CAR is also capable of transporting 1,68 million tons.
Does it stand the test of time? 9/
Silly science aside… if you replace the white dwarf star with a fictional material, this holds up remarkably well. We even get a bit of an idea of the kind of person Ray is, and even his love interest gets some characterization. That’s not a given in a 10 page story!
How close is this to the modern character? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ /
I don’t know enough about the Atom to make the call; I’ve never read any of his series.
Nothing against the guy, I just didn’t get the chance. But I’m familiar with his adventures with the Justice League and he’s awesome there!
Ray Palmer’s name is an idea from editor Julius Schwartz, a friend of influential science fiction editor Raymond Palmer.
Once again Gardner Fox makes my job WAY easier, right in this issue. Not only he spells out that they’re basically going through all the Golden Age heroes…
…but, exactly like he did with the re-introduction of Hawkman, he also explains why he decided to make changes to the Golden Age version.
I guess he was too much of a gentlemen to say that the original Atom’s gimmick kind of sucked.
After starring on two more issues of Showcase, the Atom gets his own series in 1962; he would remain the title character for 38 issues, until 1968.
It wasn’t exactly a hit. The series would be renamed “The Atom and Hawkman” with issue 39, and would eventually be cancelled in 1969 with issue 45.
Where the Atom was more successful was the JLA, which he joined pretty early in 1962 on Justice League Of America #14.
Usually identifiable by the tiny flying chair he uses when the team has a meeting… for some reason he seems reluctant to hang out with them at regular size… the Atom would eventually become the team’s resident super-scientist, and the go-to guy for science problems in the DC Universe.
In fact, the Atom would become such a JLA mainstay that Ray would eventually marry Jean in 1978’s Justice League of America #157 (the same issue when she learns his secret identity), with the whole team attending in their civilian identities.
But DC didn’t seem to want a happy ending for him. Because the 4-issue series Sword Of The Atom (which put him in a more fantasy adventure, stuck in miniature size)…
…begins with his wife cheating on him! It’s a 1983 series so it’s not THAT surprising to find more adult themes, but still.
It’s also quite a mature deconstruction of the classic superhero love interest, because let’s be clear: a civilian marrying a superhero doesn’t have a simple life!
That’s infinitely more mature that the crass shock value of 2004’s Identity Crisis, who revealed Jean was the one who murdered Elongated Man’s wife.
I would typically refrain from spoiling the finale of a series, but there’s no way Identity Crisis can get more rotten than it already is.
Jean would eventually become Eclipso’s host and a zombie, but from my understanding the whole Identity Crisis has been retconned away and Jean is back to being the Atom’s non-crazy ex-wife.
I know the Atom has been involved in some pretty complicated plots… like I said he was stuck in a fantasy setting for a while, he’s been de-aged, he’s had a ton of multiverse plots… but I still just think of him as the JLA’s resident super-scientist.
In 2006 he was replaced as the main Atom by his former assistant Ryan Choi; he was killed off in 2010, but was later resurrected. I’ve never read any of the stories where he appears, but I understand he has a bit of a following. He’s still around and occasionally working with his former mentor.
I guess the world is not too big for two Atoms.
The Atom has never managed to be a breakout star on his own… and I think one reason is that his rogues gallery sucks: Chronos is perhaps the only breakout character, but he moved to being a more generalized villain.
Another is that the most common visuals for him are either the tiny chair next to other heroes or him hanging around common objects or obstacles that are only giant to him, and that’s not particularly enticing.
Which is exactly why I feel that his real calling is being the super-genius of a team.
I could be completely wrong and have missed timeless classics with his solo adventures, but when the Atom is on the Justice League he REALLY punches above his weight.
Maybe he’s “reluctant to hang out at regular size” because he’s not wearing any civilian clothes under his costume – the one that’s invisible when he’s at full size.
The Atom was always small in JLA stories because growing to full size would reveal his secret identity. Eventually, Ray did reveal his ID to the team, but maybe the artists really liked the floating chair?
This brings up an interesting question: At what point does the costume disappear? Anywhere above six inches in height? Could Ray get to a foot tall and still have the costume? Two feet? Was the costume’s invisibility a sudden thing or did the costume gradually become transparent as Ray got bigger?
Good appearance in Justice, where he’s badly injured as Ray but still able to be the League’s miniature spy. In the floating chair, naturally.
The third Atom, Ryan Choi, briefly dated Giganta, just as Ray had been depicted dating her in the Legends of the Super-Heroes TV special.
Ray and Ryan are working together in current issues of Justice League Unlimited, but neither one uses a tiny chair, floating or otherwise. Even with Mr. Terrific on the team, the Atoms do a good share of the sciencing.
There was an attempt at making Ray a deeper, more complex character in the 1990s. After “Sword of the Atom” he had another regular series (“Power of the Atom”) with more intrigue-oriented plots.
That series ended on something of a cliffhanger, with some plots being taken by “Suicide Squad”, where another Atom appeared for a considerable length of time. Ray himself was featured in Suicide Squad eventually – an unexpected, potentially exciting development.