The Four Color Media Monitor

I looked at the message board for Collected Editions, which grew out of a Marvel Masterworks fansite, and discovered this favorable thread dedicated to the Silver Age Atom stories that makes interesting points about the characters, and with a logical awareness of whom the responsibility goes for how fictional characters are written/illustrated:

Thoughts: Off the top of my head, The Spectre is the only other superhero I can think of who doesn't make an appearance in costume in his debut story. It worked in More Fun Comics #52 and it works here as well. I credit this to [Gardner] Fox realizing that the thought he's put into scientist, Ray Palmer, his girlfriend lawyer, Jean Loring, and the nature of their relationship deserves room to settle in. Palmer has credible reasons for keeping his fantastic discovery a secret from Jean who has, unwittingly, perhaps instilled an inferiority complex in the brilliant young man who naturally assumes that the high standards she expects of herself would also apply to him. Jean hasn't succeeded in law yet and won't marry Ray until she does; ergo, Ray figures that until he's perfected his studies, he can't rightly expect to marry her. It doesn't stop him from trying, of course, but the realization is there, of course.

Not that this makes Jean Loring pushy or unreasonable - she's simply a realist withholding her hand in marriage to both encourage Ray to drive himself onwards and to push herself to make it in a male dominated profession. You can tell that Fox is striving to present a real relationship here based on the way that rather than focus on some quickly contrived explanation as to how our hero could climb those unscalable walls, he instead centers his attention on why such a sharp and intelligent woman as Jean Loring isn't asking for one. It's great seeing characters with such integrity handled by a writer who has no interest in compromising such virtue.

Well that's definitely an impressive and valid way of looking at things. And above all, it also refutes the repulsive blood libel Identity Crisis was built upon, which along with at least a few other publications at the time, distorted everything that had come before with a noxious retcon that made it sound like Jean was some kind of a gold-digger who'd also been mentally insane for many years. Either way, the whole notion she'd be thrown into the dungeons of Arkham asylum (and sexually assaulted, as a tabloid headline in Animal Man's house told, which he dismissed, in a horrific example of making it sound like all women who claim to be raped are routine liars) without trying to figure out if she'd been set up only compounded the offense.

Also note how the poster's acknowleding a real life writer bears the responsibility for however a fictional character is portrayed, and even an artist (here being Gil Kane) has similar responsibilities. And to think that decades later, some vile ingrates would take apart everything they worked hard to establish in the first place, and all supposedly so they could perform "diversity" pandering, at the white characters' expense. It may have finally been reversed over a decade afterwards, but the damage, moral and otherwise, still remains and we're still shaking off the negative effects it had all these years.

I'm hoping all these Atom stories featuring the Golden/Silver Age protagonists will eventually be reprinted in DC Finest archives, and hopefully, it will be done. For now, items like this should serve as examples everybody should ponder for why even small superheroes and their big worlds are well worth reading about.

Labels: Atom, dc comics, good artists, good writers, history, misogyny and racism, science, women of dc