3 crampons out of 5

(Collecting Superman-Team Family #11-23, Super-Team Family #13-13*)

So when DC was in the midst of WORLD-CHANGING NONSENSE with its Infinite Everything / 52 / Countdown, they started branding a lot of things with the Countdown banner and issuing some Countdown specials to prove that this was the plan all along and yadda yadda.  So along came ‘Countdown Special: The Atom,’ 2 extra-size issues collecting some old Atom adventures.  Overall, if you’re not used to the self-narrative-thought-bubble style of 60s and 70s comics, you won’t enjoy these wacky sci-fi tales, but they are a surprisingly timely find and show off Conway’s ability to straddle the dialogue line between cheeky and serious.

So, if you didna read Identity Crisis, Brad Meltzer’s soap-opera superhero meltdown from which sprung the following years of major company comic pap, I’m going to ruin a big part of it and tell you that Atom’s once-wife Jean Loring goes banana nuts.  Why does she go banana nuts?  Well, these four tales give us some potential as to why, as her identity is erased and re-erased as she’s ping-ponged through four universes (one for each issue), the Atom chasing her trail along with a guest-star superhero in tow for each variation on the story.  Read all at once it’s a little lengthy and silly and exhausting, but I imaging separated by a month or a week, this would have been inventive fun, as Conway gets to come up with new foes or concepts for Atom to face with each new universe.

Is this a necessary addition to your collection?  No.  It’s a fascinating after-addition to the Crisis continuity, but in true classic form, the stories are pure entertainment.  Conway’s Spidey tales were what got me reading comics, and the interest in his writing has remained – a willingness to be fantastic and dramatic and cheesy, but somehow without the over-seriousness or, alternately, over-hammyness of some of his peers.  It allows for some of the divide between silly heroes in spandex and the reader to fall away.  That being said, we still get some good ol’ over-dramatic “JEAN NOOOOO”s in there, just to keep us grounded, and you can you skim the panels for the gist of things – nothing demands you to stop and read.

If you like classic pulp, sci-fi-style hero tales, this is a good way to get some classic stuff for cheap.  If you don’t care, you won’t care.

*The collection notes are according to the individual comics (issue 1 has Superman-Team Family, issue 2 has Super-Team Family), so any issues with accuracy should be taken up with whoever edited these issues.  BOOM.