In 1962, when I was 8 and all grown
up, either the absurdity of superhero costumes was starting to bother me, or I
was just looking for a fresh approach to the kinds of characters I loved.
In any case, I embraced Gold
Key’s Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom when
I ran across his second issue (Dec. 1962).
A scientist altered by radiation
even more bizarrely than Bruce Banner had been, essentially into a being of
pure energy, Raymond Solar was as breathtakingly powerful as Superman.
Solar could fly at the speed of
light. He had radar vision. He could walk beneath the ocean by surrounding
himself with an oxygen bubble. He could superheat himself, freeze things,
control magnetic forces like Cosmic Boy and fire lightning bolts from his eyes
like Lightning Lad.
The scientist discovered through
experimentation that he could split himself into multiple, smaller duplicates
or grow to gigantic size. We readers got the sense that Solar could pretty much
do anything if he put his logical mind to work on it long enough.
Even though Alan Moore based Watchmen on Charlton Comics’
superheroes, the omnipotent Dr. Manhattan was probably closer to Solar than he was
to his direct inspiration, Captain Atom.
Solar’s vast power appealed to
me. So did Bob Fujitani’s art, which had the restrained, refined clarity of a
realistic newspaper comic strip — a style well suited to this character, who wore
no costume.
Again like the Hulk, Solar was
easily identifiable when charged with radioactivity because he turned green. He
also wore a white lab coat, seemingly a required uniform for fictional
scientists in the 1950s and 1960s.
Solar had only a single
archenemy, one who anticipated the James Bond films. Nuro was a shadowy,
Blofeld-like mastermind intelligent enough to suspect the existence of a mystery
“Man of the Atom” because his schemes were constantly being thwarted by
unexplainable phenomena. Hero and villain were both hidden forces playing cat-and-mouse.
As written by Paul S. Newman,
Solar’s adventures had that thin veneer of verisimilitude which helped me
appreciate them at the time, and I was eager to find out what new “scientific”
powers he’d dream up to counter whatever national or global threat would appear
in each new issue.
Until the fifth one.
I can remember my sense of
disappointment when I saw the cover and realized that Solar had, in fact,
finally adopted a superhero costume after all, and would now be known to the
public as the masked Man of the Atom.
What had made him unique was
gone.
I bought that issue, then moved on
to the many other superhero titles that were beginning to appear.
I don’t envy the comic book
editors of the 1960s trying to understand the vagaries of children’s shifting
tastes. Here I was, blaming Solar for having
a costume when I had rejected the Fantastic Four for not having them less than
a year before.
I didn’t buy the second issue of
the FF because I couldn’t tell, from the cover, whether or not they were
superheroes. I wasn’t alone and, ever-sensitive to the readers’ desires, Stan
Lee and Jack Kirby not only put them in costumes on the cover of the third
issue, but dropped them into their own flying “Batmobile” (Why hadn’t Batman
thought of that?).
I couldn’t part with my 12 cents
fast enough.
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