The Atom Number 16

A few weeks ago I bought The Atom #16. I love golden age and silver age comic books. To me even a bad story from that era can beat out a good story from modern times. I figured with a story by Gardner Fox and art by Gil Kane and Sid Greene I was in for quite an entertaining time. I was not let down too much. The art was great. The villains face looked so real I think Mr. Kane must have based it on someone he knew. The story by Mr. Fox flowed smoothly up to a point. The story starts out with Ray Palmer as the Atom stopping a robbery in Ivy Town. He has had a busy week of fighting crime and is very tired. He decides to go out of town to get some rest. Ray’s neighbors are too noisy for him to sleep. He changes to the Atom and sleeps on a small tree branch in the woods. Andrew Frost lives nearby. Andrew found out that he had ESP but it came and went at odd times. He found out that those times happened when the Atom was nearby. He set up a trap to catch Atom so he could use the energy that the Atom gave off to make him a rich man. His ESP tells him Atom is nearby. He uses the power to capture him. He takes him home and irons him out flat. It increases the energy flowing to Andrew so that his power last longer. Atom figures out that being tired yet still fighting is what really caused the energy from his body. He stops this from happening and tries to fight Andrew Frost while not getting too tired. Atom defeats Frost and finds it ironic that Frost’s scheme was due to fail anyway. Sometime the fatigue would have left his body and cut off the flow to Andrew Frost and he would no longer be able to see the future. Now the whole story of flattening out the Atom is really too far fetched for me to believe. Yes I did say that it flowed well and to a certain point it did. Still wouldn’t flattening him out have killed him? Also, in the last two panels Atom is back to his old self. No explanation is given on how he got back to normal. The art was great but it needed to explain how Atom was flattened without killing him and how he got back to normal