Super-villains didn’t ordinarily rate a big build-up in DC Comics house ads, but Chronos the Time Thief got one for his debut in The Atom 3 (Oct-Nov. 1962).
With one or two notable exceptions, the Atom’s antagonists had up to then been fairly ordinary crooks. So editor Julius Schwartz’s spotlight on the caped and colorful — well, garish actually — Chronos may have been an attempt to begin to build for the Atom the kind of rogue’s gallery that had helped make the Flash popular.
Created by writer Gardner Fox and artist Gil Kane, Chronos was precisely the kind of concept-obsessed arch-criminal who was constantly turning up in the Scarlet Speedster’s Central City.
“The tale has a neat cover by Kane, showing the Atom in the watch, but the minor tale written around it is by the numbers,” observed comics historian Michael E. Grost. “Chronos is the sort of theme-oriented villain found more often in John Broome’s Flash stories: everything he does is related to time. Just as in Broome’s tales, we see the villain starting out as an ordinary convict, learning and obsessing over time, developing his persona, working as a watch repairman and horologist, etc. Broome does all this with a lot more pizzazz.
“Fox was always a lot more interested in his heroes than in his villains, which is not necessarily a bad thing! One can compare a far more successful tale written by Fox with a horologist hero: The Invisible Dinosaur (Strange Adventures 133, October 1961).
The issue also introduced an intriguing, popular running series about Prof. Alpheus V. Hyatt’s “Time Pool” — a time warp so small only the Atom could travel through it — in The Secret of Al Atom’s Lamp. The Ivy Town university setting of the Atom’s stories made it easy to drop technological innovations into the plot. This tale marked the second time in a handful of issues when a tiny super-scientific figure had been identified with an Arabian nights genie.
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