Over the winter break, electroman and I were able to make it back to the comic book store; we had been neglecting comic books for the last few months. Well, during our recent visit, electroman was able to find and purchase the entire run of All-New Atom (featuring Ryan Choi as the new Atom) as backissues for less than the price of the first issue (which I “live-blogged” last year). Gotta love my regular comic book dealer — fairly recent backissues for $1 because they don’t actually carry archives of backissues and are usually trying to pawn off their surplus.
I haven’t read any of the series since purchasing issues #2-7, but now I’m going to do them in a series of posts as “live-blogs”, meaning I’ll give you a play-by-play of what’s happening and my reactions.
Obviously, spoiler alert.
THE ALL NEW ATOM #2
First off, this cover is a little disconcerting. What’s with this passed-out woman on this cover? Something about the way she is posed, and the way her facial features are drawn (pouty lips, and lighting) seems like a hypersexualization of an unconscious woman. And why does the Atom look like such a racial caricature? Could his eyes possibly get any slantier?
We open the book to an image of a giant bug head, and the crotch of the person who seems to be riding this insect. I’m serious — first page of All New Atom #2 is essentially a crotch shot. This is not going to be good — plus, I’m immediately reminded of how truly horrendoug John Byrne art is. I’m glad that he’s gone by #4.
So, it turns out that Ryan Choi, upon discovering the Atom belt and his incredible new shrinking powers, has conscripted his scientist friends to see if they can’t get him to try and ride an ant. Why? Who knows, but the more pressing issue is this — why is he still wearing a glorified dishrag in his shrunken state. In #1, Ryan accidentally shrinks himself and ends up naked and lost in his own over-sized sweater, so he fashions a loincloth form himself out of the sweater’s tag as he tries to run around to reverse the shrinking. I think I mentioned when I first read that, that my first inclination probably wouldn’t have been to fashion clothing, that if you suddenly find yourself microscopic, why you’d worry about being naked at a scale no human eye would ever really detect. But apparently, Ryan is insecure, since his first thought is to cover his nudity.
I get that.
But then why, in Atom #2, after it’s clear that the scientists have had time to start experimenting with Ryan and his Incredible Shrinking-ness, that their first thought isn’t “let’s work on this issue of miniature clothing”, but is instead “let’s see if he can ride an ant”.
Also, I’d really love to know why Ryan Choi still acts and sounds like a twelve-year-old. How old is he supposed to be and in what world do young scientists say, amongst their colleagues, that anything “smells like a fart” (which is amongst his complaints regarding the ant-riding)? It’s hard to imagine this Ryan Choi being older than twelve years old with the way he looks and sounds.
Whoa — okay, so in the next panel, Dr. Dinawa, one of Ryan’s colleagues, explains to Ryan about pheromones. And he says:
If you crush an ant, it sends off a different ‘alarm’ pheromone that sends the others of its colony into a fighting frenzy.
So, since I have some colleagues of mine who work on ant navigation, and I couldn’t remember them talking specifically about pheromones, I googled it.
And what do we read on the Wikipedia article on ants? None other than:
Ants make use of pheromones for other purposes as well. A crushed ant, for example, will emit an alarm pheromone which in high concentration sends nearby ants into an attack frenzy…
Does Dr. Dinawa spend a lot of time committing Wikipedia phrases to memory, or does Ms. Simone rely a little heavily on our favourite free encyclopedia for her fact checking? And, that phrasing is really similar — in academia, if I were grading a paper with phrasiology like that, I’d have to ask about grounds for plagiarism charges.
So, on to the rest of Ryan’s posse: we have “cantankerous” Professor Campbell, who asks possibly the only relevant scientific question yet — exactly how is Ryan shrinking when he’s shrinking; do his atoms themselves shrink (impossible) or does the spacing between his atoms shrink (impossible as well). It will be interesting to see if the writers of this Atom can come up with a satisfactory explanation for Ryan’s powers, given that the book relies so heavily on meetings of the scientific minds.
Ryan’s posse also includes Panda Potter who seems to have a personality more infantile than Ryan’s if that’s possible, and the stereotypical scholar, Dr. Kettering who wears a jacket with patches on the elbows and smokes a pipe, while forgetting his pants.
Alright, so we discover that if Ryan increases his size to tower over the ant, his sweater-tag toga conveniently reshapes itself to become male briefs. We’ve also discovered that if he shifts his size too rapidly (as he did to demonstrate his monologue), he becomes unstable; his cells seem to start proliferating rapidly and he begins to look like the hunchback of Notre Dame. The solution? Further rapid shifting of his size back to “normal”, at which point his tumerous growths disappear and he briefly develops a phosphorescent phallus that blinds all those around him.
After recovering from the sight of his magic stick, Panda takes Ryan out to an American Chinese food diner, where we learn that Ryan gets a sense of euphoria upon enlarging, that makes his pupils look like little atoms. Then he blacks out and wakes up hungry; at least there is a crack about how American Chinese food isn’t in any way authentic (given that Ryan is from Hong Kong and doesn’t recognize what it could be) but there’s no other real discussion about what it is and why people eat it, let alone the problems that arise with non-Chinese people thinking it’s authentic.
And then Ryan says:
I’m Cantonese, Panda. We have a saying “Cantonese eat everything that flies except airplane and everything with four legs except table”.
Two questions: 1) why is Ryan, who is obviously fluent in English, unable to translate that supposed saying into grammatical English, but reverts to some bastardized pidgin translation of his “ah-so”, “chop suey” Confucian saying that all Chinese are obviously so fond of? and 2) since when are Cantonese so eager to perpetuate the American stereotype of Cantonese people as rat and dog-eaters (as well as eaters of other items Americans might consider trash)? That anyone would write a Cantonese person saying such a thing is completely ignorant, not only in what Ryan is saying but in how he says it. If I was supposed to feel kinship with Ryan Choi because he and I would theoretically share the same race, I don’t — right now, he’s about as laudable as Survivor’s Cao Boi.
Of course, enter the leggy blonde pedophile who thinks twelve-year old Ryan is “steamy”, and who can’t possibly have a non-sex-kitten bone in her body. She basically throws herself at him. Because women in the sciences? No way they could be seen as anything other than dumb flirts.
A street muscian outside the diner is accosted by those weird little guys who really aren’t that little. Duh-duh-duh….
I do think it’s interesting that unlike Ray Palmer, Ryan Choi is only interested in becoming a superhero. He’s looking for weapons, spandex and anything else he might need to be a part of Ray Palmer’s world, but wasn’t terribly interested in figuring out how he’s shrinking and what that might mean. Rather than trying to cure diseases with his shrinking ability, Ryan is interested in making a name for himself: being deadlier than a thrombus or accomplishing the impossible like manipulating atoms on an atomic level. This is never a good origin for a superhero; the best superheroes — the ones that strike the largest chord with readers — are the ones who are doing it for a bigger reason. Ryan just doesn’t have that passion, whereas even if Ray wasn’t interested in saving the world, at least he was interested in furthering scientific understanding. Ryan only seems to want to further himself.
Ryan finds a superhero suit in a box at his house from his colleagues (because really, under what circumstance would you get a bright red and blue spandex suit from your colleagues and think it’s meant for atomic-level exploration) and then discovers someone has left the street muscian’s violin on his doorstep with an ominous note on the back. Ryan immediately has a cliched conflict moment when he says he doesn’t want to be a superhero but he can’t let a woman get hurt (and yet he wants atomic ray guns and full-body spandex) and then suits up to go try and help the lady.
In the sewers, Ryan stumbles upon a secret tiny lair of those strange microscopic alien things and although he’s stuck at his chosen size, he controls his mass and density to take out the guards that spot him. No thanks to a random and pointless reference to “Daniel-San” and Karate Kid.
After escaping the guards, Ryan runs into another part of the little mini-colony and finds an oozing mass with a single eye that greats him as ”the traveler”.
Flash to some guy named Sylbert Rundine who’s lugging a female corpse behind him (probably the street musician) and who is tapped by a mysterious man in the shadows to be a replacement for someone and who is given another Atom belt. Oooooooh, an incredible shrinking arch-nemesis perhaps?
All in all, I’m still not wowed by this comic. John Byrne’s art still sucks, Gail Simone’s writing leaves something to be desired (her Ryan Choi is grating to me as a person who is older than my tweens), and the superfluous references to Asian-ness seem to be clumsy and pointless, not to mention a wee bit racially ignorant. We’ll see how the rest of the series goes, I guess.
Spoiler Space #2 - Call for Submissions
from Jenn @ reappropriate 04 Oct 2008 6:48 pm
