The first time I saw Captain Atom, I was at my grandparents’ home in bed with one of those diseases that 6-year-olds used to get, and my Aunt Shirley bought me a handful of comics to read, including Space Adventures 36, because the cover featured one of those costumed heroes she knew I loved.
Okay, the McCarthy-esque Cold War plots were already hackneyed by 1960. Charlton Comics was clearly a step below DC, even to a 6-year-old, except in one respect — that artist I couldn’t yet name but could always recognize.
Those angular, rather contorted figures, that sparkling radioactive con trail left by the hero in flight, the bizarrely beautiful yellow lamé costume, the curving mask that seemed have been designed, as someone said, using a French curve. And then there was that long-examined, curiously symbolic cover featuring a bisected someone who was half Air Force officer, half superhero.
While Steve Ditko did not originate the “split-man effect” as a symbolic visual shorthand for a character who had a dual identity, he used it with great effectiveness.
It was an artistic device that Ditko would use again on the second, and much more famous, superhero he would co-create, at what would one day be called Marvel Comics.
In this, his fourth exploit, Captain Atom was somewhat cheeky regarding his top-secret secret identity. After an Air Force guard empties a submachine gun at the superhero (ineffectively, of course), Captain Atom flies away.
The typescript lettering reads: “Captain Atom quickly made the transition from space being to Air Force test pilot … and strolled back toward X-44.”
When the guard warns him off, Captain Allen Adam replies, “I’m the test pilot, Airman. And don’t fire that thing at me again!”
The next panel shows the guard in the background, scratching his head, with lots of question marks floating over it.
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