Another ongoing series bites the dust - The All New Atom (which, if we're honest, was stretching the "All New" part of the name after a year or so) has finished with issue #25.I really enjoyed the vast majority of this series, primarily because of Gail Simone's writing. I've said in various posts before now that it was Simone's sense of fun and adventure that made The Atom reach the top of my to read pile pretty much every week it showed up amongst my comics haul.
Whether it was Lovecraftian cancer gods stalking the sewers of Ivy Town, tiny aliens talking nonsense and living on the back of The Atom's dog or the difficulties in dating a villain who was about forty feet tall, Simone never failed to bring it off.The Atom himself, newly arrived in the States and eager to follow in both the teaching and footsteps of his hero, Ray Palmer, was an engaging character. Ryan Choi stepped into Palmer's shoes almost effotlessly and proved himself more than up to the challenge.
With Palmer back in the DCU, it could have been very easy to push Ryan to one side, but writers in the DCU seem comfortable with the idea of legacy characters, of more than one hero wandering around with the same name.Thankfully, Rick Remender - the writer who brought the series to a close - seems willing to leave Ryan be. True, he might have removed the link between Ryan and Ray by revealing that Ray had never corresponded with Ryan for all those years, let alone left him his size changing belt, but that was done in a way that made sense and didn't just trample over everything Simone had done before him.
I shall miss The All New Atom, but that's not such a bad thing.
This was definitely one of the best series out there. Too bad, so sad.
ReplyDeleteI haven't picked up the final issue yet. But after reading #24, I thought to myself that I'd probably drop the title soon. It just lost its charm to me after Gail Simone left. And I hadn't really zeroed in on it, but the whole "Ray wasn't really the one writing you" thing is symptomatic of that. It's just kind of a depressing bait and switch.
ReplyDeleteAnd the treatment of Chronos in #24 seemed to take a character I liked and turn him into a Kang retread. Now I like Kang, quite a bit. But blurring the distinction between the characters seemed like a mistake.
Oh, well.