Justice League Unlimited
Flashpoint
Original Airdate - 07/02/05

A continuation from last week's "Question Authority" cliffhanger, "Flashpoint" starts with Captain Atom confronting Superman and Huntress as they try to rescue The Question from a Cadmus torture room. Superman sends Huntress and Question ahead while he alone fights it out with Captain Atom, who has charged himself with the radiation of a red sun. His blows weaken Superman but Atom eventually loses the fight. Superman carries an unconscious Atom back to the Watchtower rather than leave him in the hands of Cadmus.

Back aboard the Watchtower, The Question confesses to Superman that he had planned to kill Lex Luthor to prevent the possible future where the Justice League becomes the Justice Lords. Superman learns the wrong lesson from this news and demands that the League confront Cadmus and Luthor for their crimes.

Green Arrow, Supergirl and Martian Manhunter calm Superman down just as Luthor remotely activates the Watchtower's laser defense system (likely set up in "Task Force X" -- see how clever these writers are?) and fires it at an abandoned Cadmus lab facility. In the minds of the public at large, the Justice League has just attacked Earth.

Another great episode that keeps the ball rolling with the main plot. While we knew that the public viewed the Watchtower's gun as a threat, I don't think anyone counted on Luthor gaining control of it and using it to attack Earth.

The final surprise in the episode at the end was even more shocking at again left me wanting more. "Flashpoint" makes an excellent second act to the story. While not as strong as "Question Authority," it is still a blast. The episodes feel monumental and the Cadmus/Luthor/Waller plotline is easily the biggest thing Bruce Timm and his team have done with their version of the DCU.

The only way these episodes could get better is if we didn't have to wait a week for the next chapter.

Derek's Continuity Corner
I've covered the bare bones history of The Question before, but am startled to note that I've never explained anything about Captain Atom and just why the military would be able to conscript him into service.

The original Captain Atom, as created by Joe Gill and Steve Ditko for Charlton Comics (yes, not DC), had similar powers to the version appearing on JLU, but wore a golden scaly outfit, regular caucasian fleshtones on his face and had wavy white hair. Occasionally he also wore a red mask that still exposed his hair; later on in his run, the costume became blue and silver.

Interestingly enough, Captain Atom actually predates Ditko's best-known (co-)creation, Spider-Man, by a few months. Though the strip had the usual wild Ditko art, the character was pretty much a standard imitation of DC's Silver Age square-jawed unconflicted heroism. Captain Atom had his origins as an astronaut, victim of an accident that rebuilt his body atom by atom.

As Charlton Comics was a pretty bargain basement company with specious distribution, the character initially flopped. But when the mid-60s saw a superhero boom, Charlton revived him and launched a few more heroes to boot. Charlton's line was then largely written and drawn by Dennis O'Neill and Dick Giordano, two men that would go on to be part of DC's early 70s revitalization.

Eventually Giordano became editor-in-chief at DC, and took steps to revive the characters that launched his own career. So DC bought the rights to all of Charlton's "Action Heroes" (also including The Question) in the '80's, just before their Crisis on Infinite Earths shook up all their continuities. The Charlton Heroes barely had a chance to exist on their own Earth-Charlton before red skies and nothingness took over.

Captain Atom made one pre-Crisis appearance, in an issue of DC Comics Presents teaming him with Firestorm and Superman. There again he was an astronaut, and Superman, at least, treated him like an old friend. At the time, Firestorm was still pretty much paranoid and in awe anytime he met a superhero with any more experience than himself.

Then came the Crisis, and the silver-skinned version we've all grown accustomed to seeing. Army Captain Nathaniel Adam had fought bravely in Viet Nam, and become disillusioned. Framed for treason by a rival for his wife's affections, Adam chose to become a lab rat rather than a convict. The U.S. Government had access to a silver space craft of unknown origin and quality; naturally, the best thing they could do with it was blow it up with a human being at ground zero.

The explosion left nothing, or at least, that's what scientists thought. Instead, the combination of the craft and human being tapped into the quantum zone, sending Adam hurtling through space-time into the mid-80s, where he emerged in that silver skin and in command of all kinds of quantum powers, such as absorbing and emitting energy blasts and the power of flight.

All this time, he was still a military man, and thus Captain Nathaniel Adam got the code-name Captain Atom. As Goodson pointed out last week, he's a hero with rank that actually earned it. The Army, by the way, tried to duplicate the experiment, but this time they used a psychotic prisoner who came out with dark force powers. They named him Major Force, and he would prove to be Captain Atom's arch-enemy until nobody cared about a Captain Atom book, then he started bedeviling the Kyle Rayner version of Green Lantern.

Despite being somewhat obscure, Captain Atom and The Question have a place in one of the most famous graphic novels of all time -- Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen. Moore had wanted to use the Charlton heroes for his dystopian vision, and at the time, nobody at DC was doing anything with them -- yet. The editorial powers-that-be balked, and Moore created new heroes, all of whom bore suspicious resemblance to the Charlton line-up. So Captain Atom became Dr. Manhattan and The Question became Rorschach.

The JLU interpretation of The Question owes more to Moore's Rorschach than Ditko's original creation; Rorschach is the character convinced of any and all conspiracy theories, which brings about the fall of the characters in the graphic novel.

All the Charlton characters were regrouped by DC in 1999 for a truly wretched mini-series called The L.A.W. (Living Assault Weapons), which included a new costume for Captain Atom that tried to incorporate all his previous looks into one and as a result sucked really really hard. Almost immediately afterward, he never appeared in it again, save for Kingdom Come, when the outfit was cracked, causing Kansas to be destroyed.

Captain Atom also had a moment of infamy when he was to be revealed as the future villain Monarch in the summer crossover event Armageddon 2001. Unfortunately, word leaked out and DC hurriedly swapped secret identities. Despite all evidence pointing toward Captain Atom becoming fascistic, Monarch ended up being Hawk. Later in the pages of Extreme Justice, it turned out that Captain Atom was actually a quantum clone of Nathaniel Adam, who found his way out of the Quantum Zone and became the second Monarch after Hawk morphed into Extant in Zero Hour. Like many such head-splitting plot turns, it looks like everybody in the DCU would rather forget about the whole thing.

For the record, the other Charlton heroes are Sarge Steel, Thunderbolt, Nightshade (currently appearing in Day of Vengeance), Judomaster, Peacemaker and Blue Beetle. For reasons made obvious in Countdown to Infinite Crisis, DC would not allow Bruce Timm to use Blue Beetle for Justice League Unlimited. Judomaster and Peacemaker, however, could use the work.

Next Week: Nope, this stunning final arc STILL doesn't quite reach its conclusion, as the Justice League tries to quell "Panic in the Sky!"

Michael Goodson