Review of "Showcase Presents: The Atom 1," by DC Comics

Review of

Showcase Presents: The Atom 1, by DC Comics 9781401213633

Three out of five stars

 While comic characters always require some suspension of disbelief, I have always considered the Atom to be one that requires the most. Like many of the other DC characters of the sixties, Ray Palmer, the secret identity of the Atom, has a prim and proper relationship with a professional woman. His girlfriend is Jean Loring, a successful practicing attorney. Ray proposes to her on a regular basis and in the now absurd sounding style of the sixties, her response to the first one is to say no and add, “I’m determined to prove I can be a success as a lawyer, before I give up my career and settle down!” In other words, professional women are “unsettled.”

 The book begins with the origin of the Atom, where Ray Palmer manually picks up what is supposedly a piece of a white dwarf star. Given that a white dwarf is approximately 200,000 times as dense as the Earth, this is way beyond the usual, demonstrating a fundamental problem. A piece of white dwarf star would rapidly sink into the Earth and no human could possibly life even a teaspoon of such matter. The writers of the Atom stories try to rely on scientific facts, but muddle them up so bad that it would have been better if they had not tried.

 The writing is also often stiff and unimaginative, with perils that never seem to really be perils and the dialog often shows very little creativity. One also grows bored with the “romance” between Ray and Jean, I struggled to generate excitement over this book.