Gardner Fox, the original writer of The Atom comics, doesn’t seem to have put much thought into naming the shops, the institutions or even the city he was inventing. The latter he dubbed Ivytown, later formatted Ivy Town, whose downtown college he named Ivy University. I’m guessing he started by naming the university, where his hero worked, then backed into the name of the town.
It wouldn’t have been the first time someone outside New Haven thought of Yale first and the city second. See, Ivy Town, the leading theory goes, is inspired by our very own Elm City. Its prominent university, of course, would be the comic book equivalent of Yale, where, in a 1961 pilot issue published in Showcase #34, we first meet “graduate student and fellowship research physicist” Ray Palmer. He’s working on a kind of shrink ray powered by ultraviolet light passing through a lens he built from a piece of a white dwarf star. (Science!) He’d first spotted the fragment as a meteor blazing across the sky, from a point that resembles the real-world overlook at West Rock Ridge, and by the time of our introduction to him, he’s successfully used the star matter to shrink inanimate objects, with the minor caveat that they soon explode.
Taking a break after his 145th failed test, Palmer leads a youth nature club on a hike, where they enter a series of caverns much more cavernous than our own Judges’ Cave. But a cave-in suddenly traps the hikers, so it’s a good thing Palmer has his lens with him. Leaving the group and finding a sunbeam that marks the only way out, he positions the glass between a pair of stalagmites and, using the sun’s ultraviolet light, shrinks himself enough to climb the tiny hand- and footholds pocking the otherwise unscalable walls. Expecting imminently to explode just like his test subjects, Palmer races to reach the high-up cave opening and, using his insect-proportion strength and the unshrunken engagement ring he’s been trying to give to his girlfriend, widens the hole to passable proportions. He jumps down to go alert the others, and, as he dashes under the beam still streaming through the lens, finds himself blown back up to normal size—and otherwise unexploded.
Thus were all the hikers saved. And thus was born… The Atom!
But a superhero, even a very small one, needs a uniform, as well as the ability to shift back and forth at will between his dueling personas. So Palmer quickly develops a wearable device he can use to shrink and unshrink at the turn of a dial. He also creates a tiny superhero suit that can stretch so thin—yet also, somehow, so loosely—that it’s invisible at normal size, allowing him to secretly wear it right over his regular-guy clothes.
Fear not: The suspension of disbelief isn’t over yet. When a tiny teleporting alien being mind-controlled by a sinister citizen robs the Ivytown Bank—not to be confused with its 1961 analog, the New Haven Savings Bank—Palmer is thus well-positioned to investigate, helping his girlfriend, the genius “lady lawyer” Jean Loring, exonerate an unwitting teller who’s about to take the fall. In the process, our hero discovers that if he makes himself small enough, he can travel through telephone lines—much like the Southern New England Telephone wires then draping the Elm City—at the speed of electricity (a stretch of science Fox actually attempts to explain in a lengthy postscript).
Popping out of the villain’s phone to foil his plot and free the grateful alien, The Atom then arranges for the latter to pop into court mid-trial, proving the the innocence of the accused. The issue ends as Palmer and Loring descend the steps of a courthouse much like New Haven’s own Superior Court, with Loring teasing her beau about when she might finally agree to marry him.
Like The Atom himself, the issue packs a potent if implausible punch in a puny package, as does the followup. So be sure to check newsstands for our next Atom installment, where alternate-universe New Haven returns alongside “the world’s smallest super-hero”—this time as he takes on the “Dooms from Beyond!”
Written and photographed by Dan Mims. This updated story was first published on April 27, 2023.
