Doctor Solar - Man Of The Atom

Up And Atom

Doctor Solar - Man Of The Atom
(The Gold Key and Whitman Years)
Gold Key Issues 1 - 27 USA 1962 - 1969
Whitman Issues 28 - 31 1981 - 1982

Written and drawn, initially and without credit, by Paul S Newman and Bob Fujitani, Doctor Solar - Man Of The Atom was not a comic I read when I was a kid. I always loved the beautiful covers of those old, Gold Key comics, which were the biggest rival to Marvel and DC then back in the 1960s and 1970s but there were not that many of them around over here in comparison to the sheer volume of their competitor’s comics and they never had the issue number printed on the front other than a kind of code number that the publishers used. I had a couple of their Star Trek issues (and a load of the strips reprinted in the British annuals), a big black and white reprint album/colouring book of some of their Boris Karloff Presents... series and, I think a Scooby Doo comic I have might be from Gold Key too (or else that one was published by Dell, like the Alvin comic I had). But those covers were always much more stunning than the Marvel and DC covers of the time and featured some nice painted artwork.

Doctor Solar was published for eight years in the 1960s, which is a fair run until you realise that Gold Key comics were never published that often and the frequency at which they were published varied form year to year. Doctor Solar was published anything from between twice a year up to maybe four or five times a year. He’s a nice character though and, having now read this Gold Key run, I found it very interesting that the style of the character changed/progressed over the stories as, one can conclude, the Marvel superhero comics which became incredibly popular from 1962 onwards, had an influential impact on the contemporary comics scene.

Doctor Raymond Solar was the real name of a scientist who worked in ‘Atom Valley’ with his colleagues Doctor Gail Sanders and Doctor Clarkson. However, while trying to stop an atomic accident which kills one of his other colleagues, Solar doesn’t die as you might expect but, like many comic book characters of the time, finds himself transformed into an ‘super powered man’ who can change his body into various forms of atomic energy to stop the forces of evil from trying to obtain the secrets of Atom Valley. Dr. Clarkson is in on his ‘secret identity’ from day one (as the president of the USA soon is, too) since Solar has to live, confined in his lab/office so others won’t have much exposure to his level of radioactivity for long stints and, also, so he can be recharged. Gail, the ‘almost love interest’ of the comic, also is let in on the secret after a few issues. Already, though, you can see the influence of Marvel since the character sometimes turns green when using his atomic powers (actually, the green colouring is a bit random in the first few issues but gets a half baked explanation for this phenomena as the series progresses).

The stories are fine and all based on scientific principles which often generated a lot of letters for the letters page where various kids would write in about continuity glitches or factual errors which the publishers would then have to try and write off with elabourate scientific explanations. He also had his own Blowfeld-like super-villain, who you would only see from behind or with his features partially hidden behind a speech balloon with just his prominent bald head to indicate he was responsible for the latest evil plot (he also appears in almost all the issues and the letters pages are full of people complaining that it’s almost always the same villain).

The early issues would contain two Doctor Solar stories per issue with a short back up strip, Professor Harbinger, sandwiched between the two. As the series progressed, the two Solar stories would be two parts of the same story but, for the 27 Gold Key issues, the Professor Harbinger stories were always in there because he was popular with the readers and I can certainly see why. These are great little stories where Gold Key’s very own Harbinger of doom would highlight a scientific achievement or miracle of nature and then start imagining/speculating/explaining to the reader what could happen if things naturally progressed on this theme in the future and how humanity might perish from the result of the seed sown from this scientific nugget. The strip would then end with an indication that Harbinger’s prophecies were already under way, which would make the Professor jump or nearly pass out until it turns out that, say, a giant bug was really just a projected shadow or a creature flying outside the window was really just a shaped helium balloon. I must say, I really enjoyed these little flights of fancy as much as I enjoyed the main Solar strip so I can see why they didn’t stop running them.

Now Doctor Solar was pretty unique for the first four issues... he didn’t even have a costume and I must say I did like that fact. However, those pesky Marvel and, to an extent, DC heroes were leading the way in sales and so various concessions can be seen coming in as the stories progressed. In Issue 5, Solar finally gets a costume to help protect his secret identity. It uses the radiation symbol on a red costume and is very similar to the costume used by the creators of The Simpsons (who were obviously paying tribute here) for their Radioactive Man character. However, he also has a visor (and glasses when he’s just plain old Ray Solar) to protect others from his unhealthy, radioactive glare and I can’t help but think this might have been ‘acquired’ from Cyclops of Marvel’s The Uncanny X-Men, who made a debut earlier in the same year. Similarly, stories where Ray demonstrates that he can cool down his body to freezing temperatures, heat it up etc might well be borrowed from X-Men’s Iceman and the newer version of The Human Torch, who would have gained popularity in Fantastic Four comics at the time. It’s all a bit tell tale when, for the first time ever in Issue 7, Doctor Solar is referred to in the narrative as a radioactive ‘mutant’... a word which was fully popularised right from the outset in the X-Men comics, if I recall correctly. Although, to be fair, the term doesn’t have the same satirical message that it did in the Marvel comic.

Again, as Ray demonstrates in later stories that he can shrink his body to tiny size or, indeed (and accidentally at first) grow to a huge, giant-sized version of himself, you have to wonder if the Ant-Man (and later Giant-Man incarnation of that character) was a huge hit with the kids at the time. And it could have been any number of Marvel villains who served as a template when, in the later comics, Nuro transplanted his brain into his robot helper Orun and became a more active, mechanical threat to his super powered nemesis.

When the strip first started, as with the Doc Savage Gold Key comic I reviewed here, the page layouts were all five panels per page operating out of a six panel grid, two by three, with one or other of the panels being stretched vertically or horizontally to break up the page. However, as Marvel and DC presumably grew more adventurous and the artists influenced other people in the same field, the layouts grow more relaxed and dynamic as the comic progresses.

And then, in 1969 and without warning, the comic just stops. Doctor Solar does have at least one later crossover appearance in an issue of Gold Key’s The Occult Files Of Doctor Spektor but I haven’t read that one yet... and I’ll save it for when I read those for another review for this blog (hopefully fairly soon). After this, the character was put on ice until the same publishers, under the name of Whitman Publishing, brought the character back for four issues running sporadically from 1981 to 1982. The art is not much different but the story content seems a lot less interesting and, by this time, the character of Doctor Solar is a lot more haunted by his fate. Also, in an age after Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, The Black Hole, Buck Rogers In The 25th Century and a whole host of other, popular science fiction films and shows, he also seems to have two ‘cute and funny’ robot helpers lending a hand in Atom Valley... which really sets it apart from the earlier stories where the writers did, at least, try to keep the majority of the tales less fantastical where they could (with only the odd alien or energy monster unleashed in the strip very rarely). These issues dropped Professor Harbinger and, instead, had another popular Gold Key character making a return in the pages, Magnus Robot Fighter (again, another run I have to read for this blog). Probably the worst thing about Whitman’s brief resurrection of the character, however, was the awful, drawn covers. These things look quite childish and are a far cry from the traditional Gold Key covers of the 1960s and 1970s.

Again, there’s no warning of cancellation on this brief reappearance of the character but this wasn’t Solar’s last hurrah, by a long shot. In the 1990s and still, I think, to this day, there are new versions of the character, although none of them are actually Phil Solar. I believe the first ‘rebirth’ of the character actually took his inspiration from being a fan of the old Gold Key comics and so, when he is transformed into a similar being, pays homage to them. I’ll probably get around to catching up with these at some point in the next ten years though, I suspect. Meanwhile, I would thoroughly recommend the original Gold Key run of Doctor Solar - Man Of The Atom as they are quite nice commentaries of a certain section of society who were reading them (I found a young Paul Gambaccini had written in on one of the 1960s letter pages) and, despite their growing similarities to the comics of ‘the opposition’ on the racks at the time, they were also their own unique thing, to an extent. Quite a change of pace from the amount of teenage angst which made the Marvel tales so popular during the same period (and which became more prominent in the Doctor Solar comics in their short Whitman incarnation).