Atoma, the first Batwoman

Bob Powell is best known for the artwork he did for the Mars Attacks card series, although one if his most obscure routines was doing the artwork for this replacement in Harvey Comics' Joe Palooka series filling in for Jack Kirby's Flying Fool. Atoma is bizarre a 6.5-page story framed for 7-pages filled up at the end by a Green Hornet ad to which each page is literally framed in a number-shaped layout. Young Dusty Rhodes(no relation to the wrestler)is a chemist working out of his lab in Anytown, USA when he unintentionally mixed together an explosion that sends him to the year 2446. Once there, Dusty is greeted by Atoma, a hot little number in a jet-powered bat outfit who claims to be a historian that knew he would be arriving at this time in the future according to his past memoirs. This leaves out the whole paradox of if Dusty hadn't travelled to the future, then he wouldn't have returned back to his own era, which is of course impossible. The batlady in the mini-skirt flies Dusty to the technological utopia called the City of Peace conveniently equipped with a nuke-proof dome, also a "Spectro-Ray Chamber" that kills off any contaminated germs they might have picked up outside. Machines have made life so easy that everyone only needs to work for an hour a day while the machines run everything else, even though this doesn't stop a random rampaging robot from nearly destroying the city. Since no one in the future uses guns anymore, Dusty was able to halt the mechanized menace with his 20th Century slingshot by hitting the robot's off button. The reigning governor allows Dusty to tour around the future for saving the day, despite Atoma admits the leader is like their own personal Hitler. That's oddly where the story comes to an abrupt end, with no resolution or even a hint at further adventures. Atoma's timeline contradicts its own physics even by Golden Age comics standards with a title character whose outfit is more interesting than she is. It's difficult to say what plans Harvey had for Atoma past this singular guest spot, but aside from Bob Powell's good girl art showing off a leggy rocketeer, there wasn't much thought put into any ongoing robot apocalypse saga.

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