The Dark Knight Strikes Again Frank Miller portrayed Ray Palmer as a major player in
Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again as part of Batman's resistance. He was taken prisoner by Lex Luthor and made to live in one of his own petri dishes for a period of months until his rescue by
Catgirl. in
Dark Knight III, He was then instrumental in the liberation of
Kandor until killed by their leader, Baal.
Tangent Comics In the Tangent Comics imprint, the Atom is "
Arthur Harrison Thompson", a subject of radiation testing on human beings. The first hero in the Tangent timeline, he inadvertently caused the
Cuban Missile Crisis to escalate into a limited nuclear exchange that obliterated
Florida and
Cuba in 1962, unknown to his fellow Americans. Thompson was succeeded by his son, who was killed by the Tangent Comics version of the
Fatal Five, and a grandson named Adam, who, in ''Tangent: Superman's Reign'', is being held captive by Superman. It is suggested in the Tangent series that the Atom's name was at least in part chosen because of the abbreviation of his full name "Arthur Harrison Thompson" on his barracks door to simply "A. Thom." Also in the Tangent series, the Atom's presence as America's first superhero during the 1960s has led to a huge cultural impact, and in this world many significant points in pop culture have been affected by his presence; for instance
The Beatles choose to be called "The Atomiks", further more TV shows such as
The Beverly Hillbillies became
The Superman Hillbillies,
The Dick Van Dyke Show became
The Dick Van Hero Show and
Get Smart became
Get Powers.
Elseworlds • Some other re-imaginings of the Atom include an appearance in
League of Justice, a story portraying the Justice League in a
The Lord of the Rings-type story where the Atom was recast as a wizard/fortune teller called "Atomus The Palmer". • Al Pratt as the Atom was one of the three heroes who chose to work at the side of Senator Thompson in
The Golden Age. When Al discovers that Thompson is really the
Ultra-Humanite, he joins the other heroes against the villain and Dyna-Man. • The Al Pratt Atom appeared in
JSA: The Unholy Three as a post-WW2 intelligence agent with transparent atomic flesh and a visible skeleton. •
JLA: Age of Wonder where Ray Palmer worked with a science consortium whose numbers at one point included
Thomas Edison and
Nikola Tesla. •
JLA: Created Equal, after Ray Palmer is killed in the cosmic storm that nearly wipes out the rest of the male population on Earth, a graduate student named
Jill Athron is given a research grant to study Palmer's white-dwarf-star-belt. She becomes the Atom and joins the Justice League. • The
Robin in the
Just Imagine... is granted transformation into the Atom evolved from an Incan rune of
Hawkman.
52 Multiverse In the final issue of
52, a new Multiverse is revealed, originally consisting of 52 identical realities. Among the parallel realities shown is one designated "Earth-2". As a result of
Mister Mind "eating" aspects of this reality, it takes on visual aspects similar to the pre-Crisis Earth-2, including the
Atom among other Justice Society of America characters. The names of the characters and the team are not mentioned in the panel in which they appear, but the Atom is visually similar to the Al Pratt Atom. Based on comments by
Grant Morrison, this alternate universe is not the pre-Crisis Earth-2. In
Countdown #30, the Challengers from Beyond encountered Earth-15, a world where the sidekicks had taken their mentor's places. On this Earth, the Atom is
Jessica Palmer, a genius who graduated from
MIT at age eight.
The Search for Ray Palmer - Red Son features the Ray Palmer of
Earth-30, an American captured by the
Superman of a communist Russia.
Countdown: Arena also depicts the Ray Palmer of
Earth-6, who through unknown circumstances now has the powers and title of the
Ray.
The Search For Ray Palmer: Superwoman/Batwoman briefly features a female version of The Atom. On the newly introduced Earth-52, Atomarsupial is one of the metasimian Primate Legion ==Collected editions==