Tomorrow night on Arrow, Ray Palmer will debut as The Atom in full for the first time — suit and everything — and some fans are, as you’d expect, perplexed and unhappy that he won’t be able to actually grow and shrink on the show.
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For the uninitiated, that’s The Atom’s main power in the comics, derived from a fragment of White Dwarf Star material that he uses to harness comic book science.
On the TV show, though, he wears a suit of armor, can fly and harness hard light arrays as an offensive and defensive weapon.
This one counts, right? In the Golden Age, The Atom was a guy named Al Pratt, who was a little guy who packed a lot of punch.
Like The Flash and Green Lantern, The Atom was reimagined in DC’s Showcase to be a more science fiction-themed hero with a Silver Age look and the often-tortured psyche to match. Unlike GL and Flash, though, The Atom had an entirely different power set: this time around, he wasn’t particularly strong or athletic; instead he was able to shrink.
The two are less tied together than the Green Lanterns and Flashes are, but have interacted a few times (as seen at right). Pratt was a longtime member of the Justice Society of America and eventually appeared as such in Smallville.
Pratt’s son would eventually go on to become the superhero Damage, while his foster son would go on to become Atom Smasher.
After he learned that his wife had been cheating on him with a partner from her law firm, Ray Palmer decided to take some time to himself, seeking out another piece of White Dwarf Star material that had crashed down in the Amazon. When his plane went down, his size-controls malfunctioned, leaving the hero stranded in the jungle at just six inches tall.
Eventually he was abducted by a race of tiny people with bright yellow skin, descended of alien prisoners sent to Earth to rot. The result was a bit of a superheroic take on things like John Carter and Conan the Barbarian, both of which had been the subjects of popular comicbook series. In fact, Sword of the Atom co-creator and artist Gil Kane had drawn Marvel’s John Carter, Warlord of Mars.
This was really just a modified version of his classic costume, adding some genre-appropriate accessories, but given the popularity of this series and the fact that it’s the first costume change of much significance I’m aware of for Ray, it certainly seems worth a mention.
Following the events of Zero Hour, Ray Palmer was a teenager again.
While battling a time-traveling supervillain who harnessed chronal (time) energy, Atom took a shot.
While his damage wasn’t as bad as the others with him — JSA members who were restored to their then-appropriate ages and either died or had to retire — he certainly took a hit, as did his relationship with his wife, when he was de-aged.
So the longtime Justice Leaguer joined the Teen Titans as their kind of unofficial shotcaller and coach. It was a new role for him, since “guy who gets really small” is rarely the focus of too many stories on a team with Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.
We got a chance to see Ray take on a decidedly different role as a member of the Indigo Tribe in Blackest Night and beyond.
With a look that was reminiscent of his Sword of the Atom garb, Palmer was pulled into the War of Light after his ex-wife, who had cracked, killed someone and then become the host for the villain Eclipso, died.
Terrorized by guilt over her crimes, he was nearly killed by Black Lanterns before the Indigo Tribe sensed great compassion in him and invited him to join their organization — a role he held onto for most of Blackest Night and Brightest Day.
The A.T.O.M. Exosuit is probably most similar to what we’ve seen from Ray Palmer, Agent of S.H.A.D.E. in The New 52.
We haven’t seen him in costume a ton, although obviously this issue of Batman/Superman shows what it looks like and he’s popped up in The New 52: Futures End among other places.
