The Best of Lame/Cool: The Best Superhero Whose Powers Are So Lame, It's Cool.

The Coolness Continuum Month At The Best Of Everything

April at The Best of Everything is devoted to explaining "The Coolness Continuum" , which I first elaborated on in the context of puns involving cosmic carrots and anthropomorphic superheroes. Today is part two of my ongoing campaign to teach the world how something can be so lame it's cool. Today it's

The Best Superhero Whose Powers Are So Lame They're Cool.

I should probably start this post by saying something really catchy like Small is the next big thing or something. But instead, I'm going to start it out by pointing out that as usual, I'm right and people who disagree with me are wrong, and here's why:

You think, people and My Mom, that you can't learn anything from reading comics. But you're wrong. You can learn, as I did, from reading comics, that white dwarf stars are made of something called degenerate matter. Degenerate matter, as you'd know if you are either Stephen Hawking or if you read comics, is matter that's so dense that the electrons in the atoms are packed in as tightly as they can be; you do remember that atoms have two kinds of spin and thanks to the Pauli Exclusion Principle there can only be a certain number of electrons in each level of an atom, right? Sure, you do. I know that, though, and I'm not Stephen Hawking. I know that because I read comic books growing up.

I also know, because I read comic books growing up, that if you stumble across a piece of white dwar star, and are conversant with the Pauli Exclusion Principle, that you could then make a suit out of the material of that white dwarf star and become the superhero known as The Atom, who is The Best Superhero Whose Powers Are So Lame They're Cool.

That's what The Atom did. "The Atom" had the superpowers of making himself really small, and really light. Those were superpowers he got only from the suit that he made out of pieces or stuff from or some portion of a piece of white dwarf star that possibly fell to earth or something; I'm not real clear how The Atom found the piece of white dwarf star. But he did.

The Atom was simply a physicist named "Ray Palmer," until he stumbled across a piece of white dwarf star and through some process that only comic-book-physicists can understand, he harnessed the power of that star and turned it into a super-suit which,when Ray Palmer wore that suit, would allow not just the suit but Ray Palmer to also shrink himself down to even subatomic size, and, at the same time, controlling his weight to be somewhere between zero, or almost-zero, and his regular weight.

So those were The Atom's powers: He could become really small, while remaining his same weight. Or he could become really small, and really light.

I need to note that I am talking about The Atom from the "Silver Age" of Superheroes. There's at least three "Ages" of Superheroes: Golden, Silver, and Modern.

Golden Age Superheroes are those really old ones like "The Sandman," whose powers were shooting people with a sleep gas from his gun while wearing a gas mask:

"The Sandman" is no longer around; I'm pretty sure he's doing time for date rape.

Modern Superheroes have no real chance of being cool. They're all angsty and dramatic and probably black and white. I'd give you an example of a "Modern Superhero" but frankly I don't care.

"Silver Age" Superheroes are the cool ones. They're the ones that didn't run around on giant typewriters and had satellite bases and Zatanna and were in their early 30s and saved the world from ancient gods and giant robots. They were sort of like if the cast of "How I Met Your Mother" formed a Superhero team and had cool powers.

This, by the way, is Zatanna:

So in talking about The Atom, I'm talking about "Silver Age" The Atom -- and note that I correctly call him "The Atom," not "Atom." His name wasn't "Atom," it's "The Atom." Like Sting's musical group before he got all jazzy and tantric and weird were "The Police." And like "The Batman" is "The Batman," not just Batman. It must, though, be awkward to be called "The" all the time. The Atom's friends never called him "The Atom" in talking to him.

I can't talk about Golden Age The Atom because Golden Age The Atom is the most worthless superhero that ever was created. Seriously. If there were a "Worst of Everything," -- and don't steal that idea -- "The Atom" from the Golden Age comics would be it. If you think Robin The Boy Wonder is stupid, wait until you get a load of the The Atom from the 1940s. Here's his official bio:

No one got less respect at Calvin College in 1940 than sophmore Al Pratt, being only 5'1" tall. The bullies in the school began to call him "Atom Al", because "an atom is the smallest thing there is". He asks out the wealthy though taller Mary James, but she rejects him when he fails to protect her from a couple of muggers, who beat Al soundly. Dejected and rejected, Al was tired of being bullied and beaten, but was unsure of what to do about it. He wanted to talk to someone about it, and ended up offering a free meal to a starving tramp just to do so. The tramp turned out to be ex-boxer and fight trainer Joe Morgan, who, hearing Al's sad story, offered to train him in return for room and board. Al's uncle had left him a place in the country, so he took Joe up there and the two began training on evenings and weekends. After a year of rigorous training, even Joe is startled by how strong Al has become. Both men are shocked when Al accidently yanks a "stuck" hotel room door off its hinges.

When Al decides to protect Mary James later on, both from a kidnapping and later from a robbery, he doesn't want her to know it was him because he wants her to love him for himself, so he does it masked in the guise of the Atom.

The Atom joins the Justice Society of America. Mary eventually gets to appreciate the true Al, and the two are married.

(By the way, if you want to google "The Atom," make sure you google "The Atom Superhero" because otherwise you get a bunch of useless junk about actual science. The good, helpful stuff on the Internet, like home pages about superheroes, is getting crowded out by websites full of so-called "science." I say leave science in the classroom where we can easily avoid it.)

A few things jump out of that biography, the most noteworthy being the fundamentally incorrect science: an atom isn' t the smallest thing there is. The smallest thing that exists is a "quark," which is defined on Wikipedia as "the sound a duck makes." Wikipedia does an awesome job of leaving the science off of the internet and in the classroom.

A "quark" actually is a subatomic particle that is the fundamental building block of something or other. I can't tell you exactly because I stopped reading comics about 2 decades ago so my scientific education ended then.

The other thing that leaps out at you about Golden Age The Atom is what, exactly, made him a hero or even remarkable at all. Read that bio again. What are his powers? That he was a little shorter than average? He was 5'1". In 1940, the average man in the US was 176.1 centimeters...

... now, what help is that? Does anyone anywhere use the metric system for anything? And don't say "Europe" because I mean places that count.

... the average man in the US was 5'9" tall. So 5'1" was not midget-sized or anything. And how did Al Pratt demonstrate his, um, powers? Tearing off a hotel room door. Doesn't that make Keith Richards a superhero, too?

The third thing that leaps out at you is that the entire plotline of at least two movies [SPOILER ALERT ONLY I DON'T KNOW WHAT EITHER MOVIE WAS CALLED SO DON'T READ IF YOU LIKE BOXING MOVIES AT ALL] was stolen from The Golden Age The Atom's biography: you know the two I'm talking about: the one where Hillary Swank dies at the end after boxing a kangaroo or something and also that one movie that I think had Keanu Reaves but also had Samuel L. Jackson as a bum and had something to do with boxing or reporting or both.

The Silver Age The Atom, who I am supposed to be talking about, had, as I said, really lame powers. Turning yourself small and staying the same weight is not much of a power. It's better than the amazing powers of ripping apart hotel room doors and becoming a Hillary Swank movie, but not by much. Turning small as a superpower means that you as a hero are relegated to a couple of roles on your superteam: sneaking into lairs to let others in, sneaking into lairs to shut down supercomputers, and riding on people's shoulders into battle.

So, lame, right? But The Atom's lameness belies how cool he is, because The Atom demonstrates one of the rules of cool that you'll see permeates everything that is truly cool (Everything that is Truly Cool includes both William Shatner and me) and the rule that The Atom demonstrates is this: Cool sticks around.

Cool has a way of hanging around. Cool never goes away. Part of becoming cool is being around so long that people can't imagine existing without you -- like our world and William Shatner-- and The Atom demonstrates that. The Atom is constantly being killed off or shuttled to other groups or superheroes or disappearing entirely, and then constantly being brought back. He joins the Justice League and rides around on people's shoulders on their satellite. He teams up with Hawkman (and there was another stupid hero).

He becomes really small and rides frogs and carries a sword-- next to small bikini girls, of course, because why not?

And, I understand now, he's currently listed as "Missing" but there is a plan to make The Atom the focus of the entire comic book world.

Beyond that, The Atom had a sense of humor about himself -- also a key requisite of cool. As you can see:

Finally, The Atom was ahead of his time. For as long as humans have been around, we've been trying to make things smaller and smaller and more convenient. We've done it with phones and music players:

And we've done it with M&Ms:

(And was I the only one who was disappointed to realize that giant M&Ms weren't a fist-sized M&M candy bar? Why is that not available? "Giant M&Ms" are anything but. They're barely bigger than peanut M&Ms. Where is my real giant M&M?)

But we did it first with Superheroes. And being ahead of your time, like The Atom was, is cool.

P.S. "Small is the next big thing." will be the line on the movie poster for the movie about The Atom. And I will demand royalties. Or maybe I should just write that movie.

Other things that are so lame they're cool include:

The Best Nonfiction Book About A Topic So Lame It's Cool.

Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!