Comics And The Atomic
Hi, everyone ! I’m talking comics.
In the time-honoured tradition of popular-culture acting as an effective mirror of world history, I put before your good selves the case of the comics industry’s treatment of an all-pervasive aspect of the latter part of the 20th century: The Atom. I’m specifically interested here in the atomic age – generally the period post World War II and into the last days of the cold war –but there are some interesting bookends to that period that I’ll touch upon. The mighty atoms’s representation, positive and negative, in American comic books is a constantly shifting entity.
Obviously, I’m not being exhaustive: there are a plethora of books written entirely on this subject; but I thought it would be fun for us to dip our toes in.
Strangely enough, the comics’ fascination with the power of nuclear energies goes back to the beginnings of the medium; namely Phillip Francis Nowlan’s “Buck Rogers”. In his first batch of newspaper-strip adventures in 1929, Captain Anthony ‘Buck’ Rogers is hired by the American Radioactive Gas Corp (really!) as an inspector. Whilst investigating a mine, he is overcome by some form of radioactive gas. This atomic hocus pocus puts him to sleep (luckily) and he doesn’t awaken until the year 2430 ! During one particular skirmish, our Buck gives the command, “Drop atomic bombs. Then we’ll land and mop up !”, as if he’s delivering pizzas !
In a 1940 strip, the great “Flash Gordon” encounters a man-eating ‘Octo-claw’ which has grabbed his beloved Dale Arden. His heroic solution is to rip out the engine from his atomic-powered land/sea car and blast the fiend with nuclear energy !
The real meat occurs after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. 1946’s “True Comics” #47 featured the highly-informative (albeit politically sensitive) “Atoms Unleashed: The Story of the Atomic Bomb”; whilst issue# 2 of “Atoman” exposed nuclear scientist Barry Dale to radium and uranium. Thankfully, this does NOT slowly kill him, but bestows upon him ‘atomic-vision’ and the ability to super-heat his body like some kind of walking microwave oven !
It’s fair to say that the ‘golden age’ of atomic-themed comics – indeed, nuke-pop-culture as a whole – was the 1950s. The comics of this time showed a strange blend of the facts and the fantastical. Take issue#11 of “Rex the Wonder Dog” in 1953: Rex discovers nothing less than a Tyrannosaurus Rex (geddit?), unearthed by (you guessed it) a nuclear explosion. Hi-jinks naturally ensue; followed by a short comic-strip instructing American kids about ‘Duck and Cover’ protocol during the advent of nuclear-armageddon – all in glorious 3Dimensions ! It’s worth noting at this point that only a year later the immortal Japanese monster “Godzilla” (“Gojira”) was unleashed upon movie screens. “Godzilla” was a pop-cultural catharsis for Japan: a way of channelling the fears and anxieties of atomic warfare from the only country to have actually experienced nuclear attack .
It didn’t end after the fifties. In 1960 issue#33 of “Space Adventures” told the origin story of ‘Captain Atom’. Unlucky test pilot Allen Adams was vapourised after being launched skyward in an experimental rocket. No worries, though, as he promptly reformed himself and discovered that he now had the power of the atom at a molecular and cellular level. He was actually one of several Charlton Comics characters that were bought out by D.C. and discontinued. Captain Atom himself resurfaced in a modified form in 1985 as the tragic ‘Dr Manhattan’ in the seminal graphic novel “Watchmen”.
Of course, I could write an entire article about the Marvel Comics characters of the 1960s who were imbued with their myriad abilities by radioactive mishaps. I’ll just assume that you are all au fait with that bunch of freaks and move on !
Things became a little more cynical (but closer to fact) in the 1970s, when the flourishing underground comix scene featured real-life accounts of atomic-powered events: “All Atomic Comics” has a wide-eyed kid on the cover asking, “ Is nuclear power the answer ?” To which a cheeky mascot replies, “ Kid, I’d bet your life on it !!” “Forbidden Knowledge”#2 has a very informative strip all about the origins of atomic power and culminates in a frank report on the detonation and aftermath of the Hiroshima bomb. Interestingly, this was around the same time that Keiji Nakazawa’s harrowing “Barefoot Gen”(“Hadashi No Gen”) was published in weekly form in Japan’s “Shonen Jump” magazine from 1973 to 1986. It told the story of 6year-old Gen Nakaoka and his experience of the devastation of Hiroshima by the atomic bomb in 1945. This story was made more effective as Nakazawa was himself a Hiroshima survivor. Like “Godzilla” nothing came close to the raw verisimilitude imparted by Japanese artists’ representation of the horror of nuclear apocalypse.
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