Thursday, August 04, 2011

Superhero could have been MORE super

A page from Showcase #35 starring the diminutive Atom, written by the excellent Gardner Fox (who DC basically based their entire existence on).

Anyway, I just noticed this. The Atom can travel by phone. He can go so small he can literally ride the current to the other end.

Fine--I can take that premise. It is science fiction, after all.

But the imaginative leap I am thinking about is the idea that the Atom could have revolutionized the entire world and even saved it for the environmentalists with this idea.

He could save the world from the tyranny of fossil fuels and gasoline. What if he could set up some stations to shrink cargo and shipments all over the world? I know he may only have a limited amount of the white dwarf star material that he uses to shrink stuff, but even doing this from one end of the US to another would be incredible.

I always wondered why Marvel's Ant Man also did not do something like this--imagine revolutionizing the cargo industry. Hundreds of shipments could be reduced into one load, saving all sorts of time and gas.

Well, I guess they don't do this because they are superheroes and it would make a really boring comic to watch the wheels of industry ship a few loads of coal across the nation.

Just another aspect that if there are ever superheroes or villains of any kind like this, they would probably really be selling stuff. Maybe Billy Mays was really a superhero--Super Spokesman! Can even sell products after he is dead!

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