He was a superhero smaller even than the children who read his adventures, but trickier and stronger than the irritating adults who told them what to do.
The formula had worked before, during the 14-year run of Doll Man in Feature Comics and his own title. So editor Julius Schwartz, writer Gardner Fox, and artist Gil Kane redeployed it in the redesign and re-launch of their 1940s super-scrapper, the Atom.
No longer an undersized college student with super strength, the new Atom in Showcase 34 (Sept.-Oct. 1961) was Ray Palmer, another of Schwartz’s and Fox’s space-age scientist-heroes dedicated to reason and education.
The first story in the issue told us, in leisurely detail, how an Ivy College physics professor acquired the power to shrink from dwarf star matter and used it to rescue trapped spelunkers.
The second story put him in costume and pitted him against one of those mirror-image foes so favored by superheroes — in this case, a diminutive extraterrestrial teleporter named Kulan Dar who, when mentally enslaved by a criminal, resembles a genie from a bottle.
Palmer’s girlfriend Jean Loring doesn’t want to marry him until she’s established herself as a successful attorney, so the help the Atom frequently provides her on her legal cases isn’t entirely altruistic — he’s working to hasten the day when they can wed.
The first and most successful of Schwartz’s Golden Age superhero revivals, the Flash, worked up any number of crime-fighting tricks with his super speed, so the Atom played similar crowd-pleasing variations on the theme of shrinking.
While retaining his full-size strength, he could ride the winds by reducing his weight. The effective invisibility provided by his small stature proved useful to the CIA. The Atom could shrink into subatomic worlds and even paradoxically appear as a giant there. His neatest trick was the ability to ride along on a telephone call, meaning that he could virtually teleport himself instantly to almost any spot on Earth.
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