Reaction: Captain Atom "Armageddon"

I have mixed feelings about Captain Atom: Armageddon, but not in the love-it-hate-it way I have with most collected editions. Rather than being disappointed that it read too episodic or feeling like I walked in on the middle of a grander adventure I could not understand (it's HAS been years since I was into Wildstorm comics), I spent more time curiously drawn forward in the story flipping through the pages to discover more and more of the WSU's vast cast of characters. And in most cases, that's a good thing. Publishers who engage in these cross-universe events have one ultimate agenda besides telling a cool story: they want to sell you more titles, and cross-over events allow readers of one product sample the other product making up a potential for future sales of that other product.

So what's the deal with Captain Atom?

Nathaniel Adam is a lesser-know second-string character inhabiting the DC Universe along-side top-tier powerhouses like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. He's a former soldier blasted forward through time from the 1950's (I could be wrong on this one) and encased in a invulnerable metal skin that contains his nuclear powers. Admittedly, he's actually a remake of another comic character from DC's purchase of Charlton Comics lock-stock-n-barrel in the 1970's.

What's the setup?

Having a personal crisis of faith, Captain Atom attempts to sacrifice his life in a Bruce Willis-esque mission to blow up a kryptonite meteor within the pages of the "Superman/Batman" comic... The meteor is destroyed sending fragments showering Earth with debris (but that's another story we're not concerned with). The point is that his quantum powers kicked in at the moment of his apparent death and sent him off again – but this time instead of jumping through time and space, through to an alternate universe. Thus begins Captain Atom's encounter with the ruthless and brutal cast of the Wildstorm Universe.

Quite honestly, I loved this book and read it almost in one sitting (I would've too except for the part where I had to go to bed and get up for work the next day). Characters were at once familiar and yet still new to me – all major players in the then-current WSU were lined up. In that I mean I was vaguely aware of the turmoil brewing in the WSU when it morphed from a series of X-Men styled super-heroes into the gritty style of relentless morally-questionable anti-heroes of the late 1990's... but I hadn't really been reading those comics (not since before "Stormwatch" became "The Authority." But I knew just enough to enjoy what was going on with those maniacs that Captain Atom was dealing with.

So where is the serious problem?

I suppose I won't be spoiling anything now, but up until now WSU continuity was pretty solid. It's not like Stormwatch changed into The Authority for absolutely no reason. WildCATs go from an underground team to a multinational corporation overnight... the comics had a logical evolution through the years of stories that were published. But now the plans were in the works for a new reboot. And this mini-series featuring Captain Atom finding himself trapped in said continuity (combined with Mister Majestic's recent adventure in the DCU and meeting Superman) was meant to be a springboard towards that reboot. So what's an event comic to do? Well, you can guess what that means to the status quo of the WSU by the end of the mini-series...

It's odd to know that I finally got around to reading a WSU title only to find that at the end of it all, none of what I was reading amounted to much because it would all be different by the time I got around to reading any new material coming out today. Now there's two ways of looking at that:

First, WSU got the raw deal... I will not likely ever get motivated now to ever go back and find collected editions of all the material that lead to final status of the WSU (heck it's been something like 10 years!).

Secondly, the complete opposite – by rebooting with such fanfare, new readers have a better chance of jumping on now than ever before. I admit that one of the factors that kept me from jumping back into WSU when I started reading comics regularly again in the early 2000's was the fact that the WSU looked nothing like I remembered it. It was around the time I dropped comics altogether in the late 1990's that a lot of the changes were occurring. I had tried to pick up WildCATs 3.0 but was lost withing the span of only a couple of issues... and the same happened with Stormwatch Team Achilles. Who were these folks? What had happened to my old favourites? The WSU was hardly recognizable anymore.

The final verdict?

The collected edition of Captain Atom Armageddon does its job rather well – you get to say goodbye to a continuity that took years to create and it does it with the most tragedy that could only come from knowing that the maniacs running around in the WSU (at the time) had all deserved their fates considering the way they handled themselves even right to the end when confronted by someone as traditionally pure as a DCU hero character.