Captain Atom #7

Did J.T. Krul not get the memo about time travel not working anymore?

Just looking at the cover of this issue, I'm already annoyed. Last issue ended with the Earth being destroyed in 20 years. And now this cover shows a futuristic Captain Atom killing the current Captain Atom. Please people, stop with the time travel stories. Nobody ever does it well. The television show Lost did the "whatever happens happened" version of time travel really well. The movie Primer did an superb job dealing with multiple timelines resulting from time travel. But most movies, Back to the Future included (although it was still a terrific trilogy), get it wrong and fuck it up. Perhaps this will be the one area where J.T. Krul is proficient.

The mystery of Captain Atom's clock is revealed at the beginning of this issue. The clock started the moment man's first stone calendar was invented.

This one, of course, was accurate to the second.

The 'it' of "it all changed" was man's concept of eternity. They lost the sense of the cyclical returning and renewing seasons, year upon year, and began to see time as a line stretching out to some endpoint. I think this is a good summation of how many people have chosen to see time from some point in our history. It's why every generation has a new group of end-timers. But mankind's view of time did not change once he erected some sort of stone calendar to keep track of specific times in the year! Those were erected when the year was everything. I would say the concept of eternity as a straight line would have begun once modern dating began. That's when time becomes a timeline. The people who made this ancient calendar were obviously just concerned with the sun's movements and how it related to them and their crops.

Of course, J.T. Krul could simply be stating that this is the moment of inevitability when mankind was put on a course to see time as a road with a destination. After the panel with the beginning follows a panel with the ending.

The Earth has already been dead a full day. This is the moment Future Captain Atom probably goes back in time, Flashpoint be damned.

My concept of time is that free will both exists and doesn't exist. We perceive time differently depending on if we're looking forward into the future or backward into the past. When he look to the future, we see possibilities. We are free to do anything we choose. The past contains inevitability. What happened happened and we can't change it. In essence, we have two different versions of time. But what the future holds is simply illusion. What we will do, we will do. Everything else is theoretical. Once we act, it cannot be changed. Thus the present changes possibility into inevitability and we see our options truly weren't options at all. Free will is an illusion.

Yet nobody knows what the future holds. And thus every action we make, even if it is the only action we were ever destined to take, is our own and our choice. It is our free will. Just because something is an illusion it doesn't mean it can't be the most important illusion there is.

Back to Captain Atom of the present, he spends some time Narration Boxing about how great a super hero he is to be able to save one person's life by getting rid of his brain cancer.

Yeah, yeah, you're awesome.

A-ha! Let me take a guess at where this is going even though a lot of my suppositions late have been for crap. In Issue #3, Captain Atom was wondering if he was working for or against a master plan. Once he helped this kid Mikey, he began to believe he was helping some kind of master plan. Or he couldn't perceive how this kind of help could be bad. But twenty years in the future, the world is going to explode. Is this going to be because Captain Atom fiddled with too many things? Perhaps he made things unstable with his powers. Is Mikey's head going to explode?! And because of his interference, Future Captain Atom needs to come back in time to bitch slap some sense into Captain Atom and tell him to tone it the fuck down before you ruin everything.

Or he'll just come back in time to try to kill his past self.

Back in the Continuum, Captain Atom asks Dr. Megala if he wants to be helped. Seeing that Dr. Megala is just a comic book version of Stephen Hawking, that means Captain Atom wants to know if he Doctor wants his body fixed up. But he declines.

He's talking about masturbation!

Captain Atom leaves Dr. Megala to his dreams to help Ranita with the particle accelerator. While observing the atoms smashing together, he is overwhelmed with memories. This part is told much better than most of this comic mainly because J.T. Krul cuts way back on the Narration Boxing. He flips between memories with just a minor Box to sort of book end the memory and place it within a point in time. Flying free from his father. Coming back to his father. His first contact with his first love. His last contact with her before leaving everything forever. But then once he's back together in the present, it's back to all Narration Boxes all the time.

Captain Atom stalks Ranita while she's out on a dinner date with Scott Alexander Alexander Scott. And while staring at them eating, he's confronted by Future Captain Atom!

No you don't. Go back to your stupid future. This can only end in stupidity.

Captain Atom Issue #7 Rating: No change. This may have been the best issue of Captain Atom so far. Sure, the cover, once again, was out of sync with the comic. This cover probably should be for Issue #8 since that last panel I scanned was the last page of the comic and the first meeting of the two Captains. So, you know, no murder. While the comic was still very heavy on the Narration Boxing (which is why it doesn't gain a rank), it had a few well done moments where Krul held back on the Narration Box Explication. These moments work far better than the rest of the book. More of this, Krul. The Boxes make the comic like reading a text book. These are the things you need to know about my story. But I don't want to read a text book! So, you know, stop it, Krul.