One of my least favorite tropes of comic book storytelling is when an issue opens in the middle of an action-packed sequence before flashing back to some time before the proverbial excrement hits the fan, backfilling all the information readers need to understand how the book’s characters got where they were on page one via a series of less exciting scenes. While I have seen the technique occasionally used effectively to build intrigue or suspense, it most often reads as a lack of confidence on the part of the creators, either in their ability to craft captivating scenes without violence or in the intended audience’s willingness to engage with such scenes. Justice League: The Atom Project #1 — written by Ryan Parrot and John Ridley, with art by Mike Perkins, colors by Adriano Lucas, and letters by Wes Abbot — employs this trope, poorly executed, and it reeks of a lack of confidence in both the storytelling and the audience, setting the stage for a middling debut of an ambitious spinoff series.
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The DC Universe metanarrative has recently been concerned with power and who wields it. The Absolute Power event, true to its name, saw all power — literally, as in the superpowers of various DC heroes — consolidated into the hands of one person, Amanda Waller. With Waller defeated, those comics have mostly returned to their original wielders. However, some have been scattered to random humans, a story playing out with superhuman melodrama in the pages of Justice League Unlimited. The most recent issue of that series set the stage for this spinoff, which sees the Atoms — both Ryan Choi and Ray Palmer — working on a solution to the crisis, in part by conducting painful experiments on Nathaniel Adam, also known as Captain Atom, one of the heroes whose powers did not return to their prior host.
Justice League: The Atom Project #1 opens with Adam traveling. Readers don’t know his situation, yet his aggressively mundane outfit and face-obscuring cap suggest he’s on the run, fugitive style. The tension in the visuals, which contrast realistic linework with sharp but slightly surreal coloring, establishes the atmosphere of a man-hunt in progress. The scene ends with Palmer arriving with military backup to bring Adam in before flashing back three weeks to explain how they got to this point.
[Related: Justice League Unlimited #1 Review – Endless Possibilities]
The opening pages are not dynamic enough to give readers an adrenaline rush capable of carrying them through the more expository pages that follow. Events depicted are divorced from any context, making it hard to understand why it matters. Perhaps most frustrating is the issue fails to close the circle by the end: we do return to this opening scene to set the stage for what comes next, but the middle section of the issue doesn’t provide a clear connection for how the events of the flashback lead the scenes bookending the issue.
The middle flashback is more interested in contrasting the attitudes of the two Atoms toward handling the crisis and what that crisis represents. Focusing on Captain Atom and two atom-themed scientist-heroes, The Atom Project casts the idea of superpowers running amok in the DC Universe as a story of nuclear power on a geopolitical scale, who has it, and who shouldn’t be allowed to.
Where Choi tries to be empathetic to those who suddenly find themselves with unexpected new and dangerous abilities — as well as Adam, who is dealing with both a loss of his identity and the physical pain of the Atoms’ experimentation — Palmer brushes all of that aside, affecting a midcentury American can-do attitude that borders on sociopathy as he becomes singularly focused on the idea of some unknown new player coming into a brand new set of superpowers. Palmer is dedicated to restoring and maintaining the status quo to the point that he’s willing to lie to children and hunt a colleague to accomplish his goal, which feels like a statement about the relationship between science and the military-industrial complex.
But also, is Palmer right? Setting aside that the Justice League routinely deals with new superpowered threats, the idea of an ambitious new superpowered player with nothing to lose emerging is scary, at least to those who do have something to lose. Parrot and Ridley have tapped into an interesting thematic vein to mine. While the storytelling in this debut issue is somewhat lacking, the premise of Justice League: The Atom Project is compelling enough to allow the creators some time to cook in the hopes that future installments can deliver with more clarity and confidence.
Published by DC
On January 1, 2025
Written by Ryan Parrot, John Ridley
Art by Mike Perkins
Colors by: Adriano Lucas
Letters by: Wes Abbot
