I have always regarded Menace of the Atomic Changeling as sort of “peak Green Lantern.”
Green Lantern 38 (July 1965) is a great example of the kind of story Green Lantern could do that nobody else could — all kinds of outré elements. Here we had two heroes with rings that could do anything up against a foe that could transform itself into anything.
“(W)hat the ring does perfectly is link Green Lantern’s imagination to the reader’s own,” wrote Alex S. Romagnoli and Gian S. Pagnucci in their book Enter the Superheroes: American Values, Culture and the Canon of Superhero Literature. “It is very easy to imagine wearing a power ring and dreaming up items to defeat bad guys.”
And here too was the familiar bird-like face of Tomar-Re of the planet Xudar, the first alien Green Lantern whom Hal Jordan had met back in Green Lantern 6 (May-June 1961).
The cover featured Hal blasting through a huge antique looking glass decorated with gargoyles and accidentally slamming Tomar-Re.
“One of the most bizarre cover scenes ever, but exquisitely crafted,” observed comics historian Keith W. Williams. “The story inside, with art by (Gil) Kane and (Sid) Greene, and written by Gardner Fox, proved to be wonderfully imaginative, and of course beautifully drawn.”
“In addition to the more-than-ample menace of the Changeling, an entity that could assume any form — living or inanimate; solid, liquid, or energy — making it decidedly hard to overcome, the issue also featured, in the back-up tale, the debut of Keith Kenyon, a tough opponent who would become a recurring foe. An issue putting our hero through his paces in no uncertain terms.”
Gardner Fox’s plot — in which a last inhabitant of a dying planet escapes to wreak havoc on humans with its special powers — is reminiscent of A.E. Van Vogt’s 1939 story Black Destroyer, which also had a strong influence on the 1979 film Alien. Here, it’s a Xudan archeologist who breaks into an underground tomb on the “dead, barren planet” Krastl, thereby freeing the Changeling, a being “created in a terrible nuclear holocaust” that can instantly duplicate and replace anyone it encounters.
Previously confined to imitating inanimate objects for thousands of years, the Changeling escapes to Xudar, where he thrills at experiencing the thoughts and emotions of intelligent beings whom he duplicates and renders comatose.
The sheer weirdness of this story fascinated me, underlining the fact that the battles between GL and his opponents were primarily intellectual and only incidentally physical.
The action evolves, finally, into fairy-tale symbolism, recalling those children’s stories in which the “real name” or “true form” of some magical being must be discovered.
There’s an underlying psychological reality to that. What psychologists call the “Rumpelstiltskin Principle” is the observation that the use of personal names has power and value in negotiations, management and teaching. We also see it winked at in the case of Superman’s omnipotent trickster imp, Mister Mxyzptlk.
And in The Odyssey, the Trojan War hero Menelaus wins a divine favor from Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, by hanging onto him through a series of slippery transformations, among them a lion, a serpent, a pig, a tree and even water (a dodge that the Atomic Changeling also tries).
It turns out the Changeling’s real form is one that haunted the American imagination in the mid-20th century: a mushroom cloud.
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