Solar Reflections - A Whitman Sampler!

In the fourth and final Dark Horse Doctor Solar Man of the Atom volume we find a delightful blend of vintage superhero yarns from across many many years as the series winds down and then gets revived a time or two.

Doctor Solar battles King Cybernoid in all the remaining Gold Key issues of the series, the android with the brain of Solar's longtime implacable foe Nuro. The series loses much of its distinctive science fictional flavor in attempting to achieve a purely superhero tone.

Dick Wood is the writer of record as the series tumbles along and Al McWilliams does one issue before giving way to Ernie Colon who gives the series a lighter touch and a bit more zip in terms of action. Jose Delbo steps in to handle the last issue of the 60's run.

Then in 1980 Whitman (formerly Gold Key) attempt to revive the series and publish for the first time the second part of the Wood-Delbo story which had begun a decade before. After that scribe Roger McKenzie is brought in to craft new stories with veteran Dan Spiegle handling the artwork. The tone of the McKenzie-Spiegle issues is completely different, very much in keeping with the slightly darker tone of comics of the late Bronze Age as Solar battles King Cybernoid for a final fatal time and a dour villain called the Sentinel.

The volume closes out with a blast to the Gold Key past with a singular issue of The Occult Files of Dr.Spektor in which Doctor Solar appears as a guest star to help rescue Spektor from a charge of murder. The story by Don Glut and the artwork by Jesse Santos is quite yummy.

And that's a wrap. Doctor Solar Man of the Atom was a product of the Cold War, when the glamour and effects of the atomic bomb were an all-consuming fascination for much of the world. Starting in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis and wrapping up in the early 80's when the Cold War was nearing its final years, the character seems to embody that phenomenon in many ways.

And that's a wrap on Doctor Solar. 

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Solar Reflections - Nuclear Nightmares!

In the third volume of Doctor Solar Man of the Atom from Dark Horse, we are treated to a fully-realized superhero. Gold Key had been reluctant to dive into the superhero pool, clearly showing a disdain for the underwear crowd which commanded so much attention in the field. But eventually they follow the patterns and give us a Doctor Solar who functions in many ways like a hero in the classic modes.

Paul S. Newman, the ubiquitous writer for Gold Key continued to handle the chores on that end and Frank Bolle had successfully taken over the art, if his style was somewhat less dynamic than what had come before. With this team we continue to get stories which are rock solid science fiction such as when Doctor Solar is forced to travel back in time to stop a deadly doomsday device by going to before it began, and later he confronts a sun spun out of control and threatening to destroy the Earth itself.

Then the stories begin to focus more on the machinations of Solar's arch enemy Nuro, an obscure behind-the-scenes villain akin to many masterminds from the Bond films and other such tales. Nuro employs a robot dubbed "Orun", one who'd battled Solar before and makes of him a steady henchman and persistent threat to Doctor Solar. We get a glimpse of Nuro's face after many years of shadows and see that he has a rather porcine countenance. Nothing much is made of this, but it suggests a slight change in the tone of the series.

Those changes continue when Dick Wood takes on the writing and veteran Al McWilliams steps into do some art on the series and we meet Hamilton Mansfield Lamont, who is Gale's nephew. This brilliant young man joins the cast which had long been comprised of love interest Gale and Dr. Solar's longtime boss and confidant Doctor Clarkson and soon becomes a nerdish Snapper Carr/Rick Jones like figure. You can for sure say that the Man of the Atom becomes a bona fide superhero when he gets a teen sidekick.

We also get a new villain, sort of when King Cybernoid is birthed as Nuro's intellect becomes entrapped in the robotic form of his henchman. This new more physical opponent again creates a more pure superhero dynamic for the book and draws it away from its sci-fi roots, though of course those notions still function to supply threats.

Here are the covers of the issues included in this volume.

Next time Doctor Solar really goes through some changes, and we chase the character through the decades of the 70's and the 80's.

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Solar Reflections - Doctor In Red!

With the second volume of Doctor Solar Man of the Atom we are getting a full-fledged superhero, a bright and shiny man in red who saves the day when it's needed. The adventures though in this volume also explore the unique nature of Doctor Solar, putting him through a wide range of transformations, not for Solar are the machinations of sundry super-villains but rather it is often Solar battling against the peculiar side effects of his own awesome power.

Frank Bolle

All the stories here were drawn by Frank Bolle, an artist with a flair for the real but lacking the oomph often associated with superheroes. The writing on this series transitioned in the tenth issue with the ubiquitous Paul S. Newman giving way to Dick Wood.

In these stories Doctor Solar is pitted against Nuro time and again who fights most often by proxy and very often using machines. The first of these is a device which challenges the reality people see, but Solar is able to fend off these threats and save Blue Valley. Then it's a computerized robot named Transvac which is able to absorb energy including the energy which comprises Solar himself, but that energy is possessed of a min which uses strategy to escape. Then for a couple of issues Solar has to contend with an overabundance of energy which swells him to gigantic proportions. It is through the steady and reliable help of his best girl Gail he often found his way to return to some semblance of humanity, whether in scale or temporally.

For Gold Key, a company that clearly didn't get the whole superhero zeitgeist, Doctor Solar Man of the Atom is an anomaly. Other superheroes from the company were either parodies of the form (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Owl) or firmly rooted in science fiction like Solar (Magnus, Robot Fighter). It's Solar's magnificently resplendent red costume which has made him an iconic hero worthy of revival over the decades. Sure the nature of the hero, a many torn asunder by the power of the atom and reshaped into something akin to a god is fascinating, but without that costume it's all for naught.

Here are the covers in this collection, all by the great George Wilson.

More Doctor Solar next week. 

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Solar Reflections - Man Of The Atom!

Dated October 1962 the debut issue of Doctor Solar hit the stands as the fledgling Gold Key brand was first trying to establish itself after the split from Dell. The talents at Western Publications were eager to try out their own stuff and adding a "superhero" seemed necessary for  a comics company. Under a lush and mysterious Richard Powers cover, this comic seemed to be what it was -- a strange blend of science fiction and superheroics, with less attention on the latter.

In the debut story "Doctor Solar's Secret", we meet Doctor Philip Solar, a nuclear physicist who works at Atomic Valley. There he is trapped inside a sabotaged nuclear pile and the radiation, which kills his colleague does not kill him, instead he finds himself changed and weirdly quickened by the radioactivity. His skin becomes a vivid green and he seems to be dead save that he isn't. The only person who knows his secret is Dr.Clarkson, his boss, who works with Solar to keep him alive by giving him access to radiation he needs. Ignorant of his true nature is Gail Sanders, a newly arrived and quite attractive scientist who is smitten with Solar. The man behind the sabotage is the mysterious Nuro, who will be the villain throughout the series.In the second story "An Atomic Inferno" the agent of Nuro runs afoul of Gail and stops her and destroy Atom Valley before she can reveal his secrets, but not before Solar can save the day. The agent pays for his failures.

Esteemed science fiction artist Richard Powers does the first two covers for the series run before George Wilson takes over. The artwork on the early issues is by Bob Fujitani and it is stellar, offering up the a nicely dramatic but still exceedingly real world for Solar to operate in. Frank Bolle became the regular artist with the sixth issue and his style is certainly in the spirit of Fujitani's but alas to my eye lacks some of the power. The ubiquitous Paul Newman writes the scripts for all the Solar comics, and Matt Murphy is given credit as co-writer.

In subsequent issues we get stories like "Remote-Controlled Traitor" which has Gail Sanders kidnapped by Nuro's agents and she becomes a saboteur before she is confronted and saved by Solar, and  "The Night of the Volcano" has Solar leaving the confines of his laboratory and rushing to save the region from a tremendous volcanic eruption which had been unwittingly triggered by experiments from Atom Valley itself. Eventually he visits undersea cities and confronts aliens other scientists with odd and sometimes villainous goals. Always the mysterious and malevolent Nuro is lurking behind the scenes,even sending a robot to infiltrate Blue Valley in one issue. 

These early stories have a specific science fiction feel to them, as the always staid and conservative Gold Key folks were really reluctant to tap the superhero vein, but rather wanted to market a character who was just a scientist with an unusual condition. They seemed to be designing for television shows rather than superhero comics. Of course they eventually relented and gave Doctor Solar a costume in the fourth issue, but the nature of the stories really didn't change all that much in these early issues. All the stories were written by the phenomenal Paul S. Newman save for the seventh which was written by Otto Binder.

Here are the covers for the first seven issues. 

More "Solar Reflections" to come next week.

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Children Of The Atom!

Captain Atom created by Steve Ditko and Joe Gill for Charlton Comics, is almost certainly the most famous and most enduring of the many superheroes who were born of the atomic age. He was the very byproduct of an atomic blast, a man transformed by the destructive power of an atomic bomb into something which could use atomic power for the betterment of the world. But while he was the most famous, he was hardly the only hero. 

From Atoman by Jerry Robinson from Spark in 1946 to Radioactive Man from Bongo in 1996, here are fifty years of fun-loving characters who adore nothing so much as to play with the very fabric of nature and reality. But then, that's what comics are all about anyway Enjoy a good look at these four-color "Children of the Atom"!

More Atomic Action tomorrow!

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