Peril In a Very Small Place!
For most of its long history, World’s Finest Comics was home to Superman and Batman, first as parallel “lead features” and later as co-stars in shared adventures. For a brief period in 1971-72, however, DC shook things up a bit, pairing Superman with a rotating cast of guest stars just as they did for Batman over in Brave and The Bold.
Interestingly, I’m pretty sure my first issue of the title (and one of my first comics, period) was from this period. I have powerful memories of #208, with its tremendous Neal Adams cover showing Superman and Dr Fate pulling the Earth back into orbit with massive chains. That one sparked a lifelong fascination with both Fate and Adams.
So it was with some eagerness that I dug into the team-up tale in WF #213, titled “Peril In A Tiny Place”. I mean, with Superman, The Atom and a great Nick Cardy cover, how can you go wrong, right? Well…
Writer Elliot Maggin (this one’s so early, he hasn’t adopted the “S!” in the middle yet) starts us off at Ivy University, where Professor Ray Palmer is researching the gene factor that allows him to become the Atom without blowing up (as everything else does when he shrinks it). When the culture on his microscope slide shrinks beyond the point where he can see it, he hopes to get an assist from Superman’s famous microscopic vision. Placing a phone call to Clark Kent, he shrinks to his Atom persona and prepares to perform his famous trick of riding electronic impulses along the phone lines.
Not knowing he’s about to get a momentous phone call, Clark is trying to relax at his Metropolis apartment…
Perhaps confusing him with Bruce Wayne (or Hugh Hefner?), artists Dick Dillin and Joe Giella have dressed Clark in a purple smoking jacket with a yellow cravat; decidedly aristocratic duds for a working stiff like our Clark, but at least they skipped the cigarette holder.
The phone rings, and The Atom begins his journey along the phone lines to Metropolis. Suddenly, however, he comes to an electronic disturbance that blocks his way and looks ready to fry him. Meanwhile Clark is frustrated at the silence that greets him when he picks up the phone. He’s about to trace the call with his vision powers when he hears a disturbance outside and goes to investigate as Superman.
All along Clinton Street, traffic has come to a standstill as drivers have abandoned their cars and crowded the sidewalks. A police officer informs Superman that “every piece of metal for three blocks around is charged with electricity!” (including all those cars). Superman leaves the patrolman — who bears a distinct resemblance to editor Julie Schwartz — to pay a visit to an art store run by two shopkeepers with familiar names.
I’m not sure if art store employees really dress like pharmacists, but who would know better than these guys?
Anyway, with his newly purchased spray cans in hand, Superman races through the streets, spraying the door handles of all those stopped cars with “non-conducting enamel” so the drivers can return to their vehicles and leave the area. For good measure, he also sprays the doorknobs on the local apartment buildings…
That’s one powerful stream coming out of those cans, huh? He hit those doorknobs from 20 feet away. I sure hope the owners of those cars agree that having their rides sprayed with red and yellow paint is a fair trade-off for avoiding electric shock. And you know what, somehow having Superman pump all those aerosols into the atmosphere strikes me as running a bit counter to Maggin’s usual sensibilities, but then again it’s 1971…who knew?
Still stuck in his sub-atomic limbo, The Atom turns on his Justice League emergency signal, albeit without much hope it will help him. Spotting a planet-like structure, he manages to maneuver himself to it and begins exploring.
By now, Superman has traced his neighborhood’s electrical problems to the phone lines under the street. He returns to his phone, still off the hook, and listening closely he faintly detects a distant sound in “the same pattern” as a JLA emergency signal. Using the Kandorian Shrinking Ray from his Fortress, he reduces himself to miniature size and jumps into the phone to investigate.
The Atom, meanwhile, has discovered an alien race, led by a yellow and green Mark Twain lookalike. We know Dick Dillin designed him because, as usual, we can never quite tell whether he’s wearing gloves or not. His shirt sleeves are pushed up to expose his bare forearms but a close-up shows seams stitched in his fingers.
Here’s where I get lost, frankly. If I understand correctly, these humanoid, English-speaking aliens live inside the phone line, their tiny world powered by the flow of electrons going through the lines. Recently, however, an electronic something-or-other (the same disturbance Atom saw earlier) appeared in their “sky” and started absorbing the electrons, weakening the denizens of this subatomic world and causing them to start dying off.
Right about now, Superman is drawing near. He sees the electrical disturbance and exclaims, “Oh,no, it’s…a GENESIS MOLECULE!” My sentiments exactly.
Locating The Atom, Superman explains that the molecule “is going to reproduce by fission any moment…and this whole universe will blow up! I have to get you out of here and move this THING to an uninhabited world. It may be the basis of a new form of life — based on electrical rather than chemical energy.”
“You want to move that thing,” asks the Atom, “and let it absorb everything in this sub-atomic universe?” “Yeah,” answers Superman, even though the Atom’s question presents a complete contradiction in terms. How can he move it elsewhere AND at the same time leave it to destroy the place where it is now? Anyway, Atom introduces Superman to the local population, the existence of which moots the “absorb everything” option.
So it is that Superman and The Atom fly around for two solid pages doing…well, it’s unclear what they’re doing, but the captions relate an inspiring “Pledge of A Superman” (more on that later). The Atom is finding it hard to survive near the Genesis Molecule, so Superman comes up with a plan to help him. Sort of. I think. Heck, even the Atom is lost by this point, and he’s a physicist.
Note our pal Dick Dillin at work again in the above image. We know The Atom is wearing gloves, but Dillin draws him with fingernails. Maybe Dick lived in a Bizarro world where gloves have nails and hands have seams?
“The molecule is about to split into two!” says Superman (in a panel where Dillin and Giella are drawing it as two molecules already). “The only way to destroy it now…is to HIT the two nucleii with our force at the exact moment of fission!” So, hitting a nucleus keeps it together instead of splitting it apart? Right, got it.
At exactly the right moment, the heroes hit the nucleii. The resulting explosion sends them back along the phone line and out of Clark Kent’s phone. Atom enlarges to his Ray Palmer ID and enlarges Superman with the Kandorian Shrinking Ray (good thing you found someone in that phone line, Superman, or else who would’ve enlarged you?). Superman (now Clark) says he saw that the alien race survived, and Ray is happy, but Clark points out that they had to destroy one thing — and the life it may have spawned — to save other lives, a choice that is causing him some emotional turmoil. For some reason, Ray is turned on by this revelation.
This panel is just weird. Since when does Ray Palmer, physicist, university professor and all-around square have the anti-establishment, hippy sensibilities of Oliver Queen? Would he really use a term like “Superguy”? Was there ever anything in his past potrayals to suggest he’d see Superman as “a muscle-bound enforcer of his definition of Justice”? If he thinks the guy is such a lumbering fascist, why did he seek his aid in the first place?
However, even if he botched the Atom’s character (for me, anyway), it’s great fun to see the still-new-at-it Maggin developing his distinctive vision of Superman. There’s an early bit where Clark is listening to his favorite music, “the classic Sonic Flare Patterns — by the musicians of the planet Polaris Four,” establishing the exotic tastes and unique sensibilities acquired by a veteran of interstellar and inter-dimensional travels, and adding to what will become a long list of arcane references to alien cultures and peculiar hobbies for the Man of Steel.
Better yet is Maggin’s “Pledge of A Superman,” still inspiring despite the accompanying pictures of our heroes flying around in an incomprehensible aerial dance of some sort:
I will use this power for all the good that can be done…
To work for peace…
To encourage virtue…
And above all, to preserve life, in all its forms…
Or failing in that, to give up this power…forever!
Nice bit, that; a proverbial diamond in the rough that is this plot. Other than that, the high point of the book is a pair of ads for other books due to hit the shelves in the coming months. One is a mysterious Jack Kirby project featuring a hideous, yellow-skinned monster in spandex and cape: “From the mists of the past comes a strange, unearthly hero! The Demon! Like nothing you’ve ever read before!” The other is a much more low-key ad saying simply, “A different comic mag is coming…” while a nearby picture shows a shadowy, green creature looking at us over his shoulder. Beneath him a legend reads: “Swamp Thing.”
Yeah, as if. I ask you, who would waste their 20 cents on two such weird and unappealing concepts as those, when everyone knows that in a few years, collectors will be offering me big bucks for this here Superman/Atom team-up?
Love it. A tale from one of my favorite eras of World’s Finest. They tried to make it a team-up book for Superman like Brave and the Bold was for Batman.
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Yeah, I have a soft spot for a lot of these Schwartz WF issues, as I picked up quite a number of them off the stands when I was 9 or 10. This particular Atom tale I missed at the time, and read much later so I don’t quite have the same attachment. I agree that Maggin was still finding his way as a writer at the time - this was probably the 3rd or 4th story he ever wrote I’m guessing?
He wasn’t the only one who had trouble writing the Atom back then though - I think it was Denny O’Neil who introduced Ray Palmer’s “inferiority complex”, and later writers ran with that ill-conceived notion unfortunately.
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Well, of course a guy that short would have an inferiority complex, right? :-p
People complain that Silver Age DC characters were cookie-cutter Dudley Do-Rights with no “characterization,” but when most of them got “character,” they were worse off for it.
This bit with Ray just struck me as very weird. I can’t decide if Maggin just forgot what character he was writing (channeling Ollie), or if he just felt it necessary to apologize to his hip college pals for writing Superman, the original “American Way” square. Is Ray supposed to be giving expression to a commonly held sentiment? It’s kind of early on to find an example of DC treating the character as a liability, though they’re well-practiced at that nowadays. Either way, it sure comes from left field, and if he meant to make anything of it, he should have showed it to us (by having Ray start off with misconceptions, then work them out) instead of “telling” us. (”Oh, I forgot to mention, there was conflict between these characters that’s now been worked out. It’s okay to leave that out til the end, right?”)
Somehow I remember liking Dillin’s art better as a kid, though maybe that was thanks to some Giordano inks on the Batman issues? Either way, I grew very tired of his stiff figures and his handful of over-used poses in his long, looooong tenure on the JLA book. He always struck me as a guy who’d have been happier doing fashion ads where tall, thin guys stood straight all day except for maybe bending their wrist to glance at their watches, or adjust their sunglasses. He never managed to make superheroes look good flying, and when it came time for acrobatics, things just got pathetic.
I remember feeling a lot of guilt when I finally got my wish and a new artist signed on to JLA…George Perez no less!…because it took a fatal heart attack to do it.
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I remember this story fondly. I think you’re being too hard on Ray Palmer - he’s thinking his comments, not aggressively berating Superman as Olliver Queen would. It’s entirely possible to be a “physicist, university professor and all-around square”, and still have a somewhat wary perspective on the moral philosophy of what’s essentially a living weapon of mass destruction. I took it as more along the lines of “Wow - he really thinks hard about the ethics of using his great powers, I always thought he was an unreflective jock”. I don’t think it’s unreasonable - Atom and Superman are JLA colleagues, respect one another, but they wouldn’t hang out together like e.g. Batman and Superman did in this era. And it doesn’t have to be the point of the story itself.
The jarring character bit for me was the last panel of this story, the gag where the musician mentioned at the start complains about the weird alien music, saying it’s retaliation for his practicing (calling it a sound-effects record). Kal, if you’re mild-mannered Clark Kent, why are you playing weird alien music at a volume that your neighbors can hear? Isn’t that bad for the secret id? And if your neighbor’s noise is bothering you, just zip over the Fortress (and it’s not like you need to sleep). There, you can rock the house without risking anyone getting suspicious. Also, I can believe the aristocratic duds, since this is Kal, not Clark, but why is he wearing the glasses, since there’s nobody around?
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Seth, I do have a problem with Ray’s opinion whether he says it out loud or not. Keeping it silent just means he’s not an abrasive jerk like Green Arrow, but thinking it at all strikes me as out-of-character. The Atom and Superman have at this point been on many JLA missions together; it’s not like Ray only knows him from newspaper stories. To Ray he should be more than just “that all-powerful guy I’ve heard about.” You have to wonder what secret fears or resentments he harbors toward Batman (he knows too much) or the Flash (he could be goosing Jean Loring at super-speed!).
Sure, the potential is always there for things to go horribly wrong with a guy as powerful as Superman, but if anyone should have a clear understanding of his true character, it should be his colleagues in the League.
Ray should know Clark is more than an “unreflective jock,” considering he’s demonstrated great intelligence over the years. More disturbing to me is that “HIS definition of justice” crack, which implies Superman is a vigilante, or a bully, which is totally ungrounded (unless you go back to 1938). Things were starting to change at DC in 1971, but even then it was pretty clear who the good guys and bad guys were, and nobody in their right mind could see stopping Despero or Starro or Brainiac as “a moral gray area.” Alien conquerors and mad scientists try to take over the world, you stop them, period. When was the last time Superman took sides on any controversial social issue? Poor guy, if he stops Amazo, Ray Palmer calls him a fascist, but if he doesn’t beat up slumlords Oliver Queen calls him a mindless defender of the status quo.
In fairness, though, I left out something potentially important. Before Ray thinks that thought about Superman, he says it’s great that the tiny race of people were saved, and Superman answers, “That’s easy for you to say, with your mathematical scientist mentality…”
Whoa! Where did that come from? So maybe I should cut Ray some slack, since Superman started it. If there’s one thing a scientist doesn’t like, it’s being told his thinking is limited.
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