A superhero, and member of the Justice League.
Description[]
Atom appears as a short, young-looking man with dark eyes. His costume has the traditional blue-and-dark-red coloring, but the patterning is different with a broad red chevron across the chest and red bands down the outsides of his legs. As a person, he is good-natured, unassuming, and devoted to his scientific work, but his wide, staring eyes give him a nervous and unsure look. He is initially hesitant to join the Justice League because he thinks he is not forceful enough. When the members tell him that they need him for his mind and ingenuity, he agrees to join and shows himself to be just as inclined to heroics as any other.
The main power of Atom is his ability to shrink down from his normal size and grow back again. This is achieved by touching a disk on the front of his belt and is accompanied by a brief, bright image of the atomic symbol.
At reduced size he can still punch with force, as he is said to have "relative mass", meaning that he still has at least some of his full-sized weight. It is not clear whether he can also vary his mass as he changes size, as elsewhere, and also he is not sure how far he can actually reduce in size. When shrunken down, Atom can do things like travel through a person's body to remove an infection, pass inside a power ring to investigate its workings, act as a computer virus inside an Apokolipsian 'Mother Box', or manually work the controls inside a disabled robot.
Atom is a scientist and develops what he calls his "White Dwarf tech" for reducing things in size and can apply this to people to shrink them too but has different ways of doing it. One is to give duplicates of the disk on his belt to others to allow them to shrink - but only for 30 minutes - and another is to simply hug an opponent to shrink them along with himself. To be able to reduce Superman in size, Atom has to place him in a chamber that makes use of kryptonite. He can give advice to the Justice League about microscopic matters and can also propose plans - like restoring Kandor to its proper size. His inventiveness extends to the creation of weapons too, with a kryptonite 'light saber' being an example.
Appearances[]
- 21. Inside Job
- 24. Battle for the Bottled City
- 28. The Fatal Fare
- 37. The Ringer
- Short 1. Up and Atom
Links[]
- Atom at Wikipedia
Notes[]
- The artists seem to have difficulty with Atom's complex color scheme as he sometimes has blue on the backs of his legs and at other times red.