By Gail Simone, Mike Norton, Eddy Barrows & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-1568-2
Gail Simone is arguably the best scripter of superhero stories currently working in the business. She can handle High Concept attention grabbers, fight scenes and pathos easily, but where she is unsurpassed is in the rounded depth of her characterisation. Combine that with solid plotting, bravura whimsy and the sharpest, funniest dialogue money can buy and every thing she touches becomes a thoroughly delightful “must-read†item.
Here she continues to reveal the trials and tribulations of the freshest incarnation of one of the Silver Age’s most enduring heroic brands with the further adventures of neophyte college professor and scientific adventurer Ryan Choi – the All-New Atom.
After Identity Crisis size-changing physics Professor Ray Palmer disappeared, leaving his world behind him. But life goes on, and his teaching chair at Ivy University was offered to a young prodigy from Hong Kong who just happened to be Palmer’s pen-friend and confidante: privy to his predecessor’s secrets ever since he was a child.
Ivy Town has seen better days however and continues to go downhill. No longer the sedate place Palmer made it sound, this collection (reprinting issues #7-11 of the much missed monthly comicbook) continues to reveal a city plagued by temporal anomalies, warring tribes and supernatural freaks. To make things worse the new Dean is an unctuous toad and possibly worse, whilst Choi’s fellow science professors are a bizarre band of brilliant loons.
This volume commences with the two-parter ‘The Man who Swallowed Eternity’ and ‘The Entropy of the Universe Tends to a Maximum’ illustrated by Mike Norton and Andy Owens, wherein the time-hiccups that pepper Ivy Town go into overdrive, necessitating an unwelcome intervention from the Temporal police known as Linear Men before Choi uncovers a tragic secret that draws him uncomfortably closer to his missing mentor.
That’s followed by a gratifying, thrilling change of pace and tone when the young professor returns to Hong Kong to rescue his sometime true love in ‘Jia.’ Drawn by Eddy Barrows and inked by Trevor Scott the saga kicks off with ‘Her Name Meant Beauty’ and we discover some unpleasant truths about Ryan’s childhood…
In ‘Unwanted Advances’ Choi realises being a superhero can’t compensate for the girl he loves marrying the bully who made his life hell, and its even worse when the brute has become a vengeful ghost determined to kill them both, but mercifully in ‘The Border Between’ ancient wisdom as well as unwelcome truths help the diminutive hero overcome the supernatural odds…
The utterly enchanting career of the new Atom is funny, charming, stirring and incredibly addictive: moreover this completely planned mapped out series is riddled with clues and hints cunningly left that will only make sense when the final volume ends – and Simone has the nerve and confidence to treat the entire venture as a fair-play mystery. Follow the All-New Atom, match wits with the writer and have a huge amount of fun along the way.
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