Captain Atom #9

I hope the end is near! Is this comic being cancelled in the next wave?

Captain Atom was busy in his own future trying to find out what to change in his present in which is the future Captain Atoms' past so that the world could be saved without the future Captain Atoms changing their past! Oh, just go with it! It's a stupid story and a dumb plot device. But maybe it will end up simply being a dream and then the story will have used a slightly dumber plot device.

You were an 8 year old boy! The percentages weren't high that you'd be anything other than those adjectives you used to describe yourself.

Captain Atom observes that he's become something to be worshiped in the future. The boy he saved from the brain tumor (and, I'm sure, a certain percentage of all the people he saved) went through the same survivor guilt crisis of meaning that Captain Atom went through when he survived his transformation. This Mikey Parker is Captain Atom's human analogue. Parker believes he's Captain Atom's prophet and he was saved to spread the word of Captain Atom. Although Captain Atom didn't give him anything to say. So every thing that Parker says about Captain Atom and what Captain Atom is doing in the world is purely from Parker's own imagination. But why reinvent the religious wheel, you know? I wonder if Parker even wrote his own Captain Atom Bible and presented it as some divinely inspired text?

Captain Atom has trouble with this entire thing and spends a few pages moping about it in his Narration Boxes. "I didn't want this! It sickens me! I never wanted to be a God!" But he finds the world a much better place than twenty years previously. At least across most of it. And then he discovers Ranita while other forms of himself continue to search the world for possible causes to its destruction.

If his power affected her hand like this, what has happened to everything he's every atomically interfered with? Or everyone that Ranita is healing with her hand? Is the cause of the Earth's destruction because everything became unstable from fiddling too much with its structure?

Another one of Captain Atom's forms finds Mike Parker. It turns out today is a very special day where Parker's cult will wipe the slate clean and destroy all the evil in the world with the Orb of Chrono Mota.

All of this time travel crap has him muddled.

Captain Atom tries to get Parker to stop "wherever" is happening but Parker thinks Atom's plea is merely a test. It seems as if the orb were created by Captain Atom and Parker's beliefs were given to him through dialogues with Captain Atom. Of course, not this version of Captain Atom! It would have been nice if the other Captain Atoms had filled him in on some of what was going on. Or perhaps it's all just a trap by the future Captain Atoms to kill the past Captain Atom because the destruction of the world is Captain Atom's fault. I hope that's it! Bye bye, Captain Manhatom!

The Orb begins to drop into a hole leading to the center of the Earth when a cloud of energy appears and shoots a purple lightning bolt into Captain Atom and every version of him across the globe is fried. The Captain Atom in Parker's church remains although slightly incapacitated. He crawls across the floor and follows the orb into the center of the Earth. But somehow as he's falling, he ends up surrounded by dirt and enclosed deep within the Earth. I say somehow because I have no fucking idea what just happened. The purple energy was tugging him and then I turned the page and he was encased in dirt. Fine. Don't explain anything to me, Krul! I imagine since I can't follow the action with pictures and dialogue, you'll catch me up on what's happening through narration.

And he does! I just have to be patient sometimes! Captain Atom has returned to his own time so the hole was gone and he was surrounded by dirt. He ends up digging down into magma and creating the volcano in New York from Issue #1! Ta da! Full circle! Does he get to start over now?

No, no. No starting over. I would think J.T. Krul would want to start over from the beginning and do it right this time! But instead, Captain Atom is sucked back into the time stream where he gets to speak with his future selves. The ones know everything that Captain Atom knows because they are him. But they don't seem to know the things he's going to do which is totally stupid. Why isn't there a Captain Atom from every single point in time in the time stream? Why are there only a handful? This is that Flaccid Sci-fi I was saying that Scott Lobdell writes. I call it Flaccid Sci-fi because it doesn't stand up to any scrutiny at all. Just looking at it makes it turtle up.

Let me just finish this mess with a summary: the purple energy is Captain Atom from thousands of years in the future. It is called Chrono Mota and it is a destroyer of worlds. Somehow Mike Parker, the cause of Earth's destruction, knows about and is a follower of this aspect of Captain Atom even though future Captain Atoms can't change the past which is why the future Caps recruited past Captain Atom. The issue ends with Chrono Mota in the time stream attacking all of the Captain Atoms at once.

Captain Atom #9 Rating: -1 Ranking. This whole time stream business is just death if you want your plot to stand up to any scrutiny at all. On the plus side, all Captain Atom has to do to stop the destruction of the Earth in twenty years is kill Mike Parker when he returns to his own time! If he survives the confrontation with CHRONO MOTA!