Man of the Atom, a misc. comics fanfic

Those of you reading may have stumbled on this or came here knowingly, recognizing a certain phrase or some other sort. Let's not beat around the bush, I confess that writing Doctor Solar fanfiction is quite odd and unnecessary. There are so many other fandoms one could be busying their time and energy with. Who should care about some old Gold Key property that hasn't been relevant since the 90s and no amount of Dynamite or Dark Horse reboots can change that. So why the hell bother with it? I wasn't even around for the old Gold Key days, or even the Valiant and Acclaim days either. But, through some dollar store bins at the local comic shop, I happened to encounter Solar and just couldn't get enough of him. Fast forward to our shared time in the Pandemic, and I couldn't help but let my mind wander to what could have been with the character had everyone left Jim Shooter alone and let the man play with his superheroes.

I wanted to write a story about The Man of the Atom, in what could only be considered as pure wish fulfillment, like revisiting that friend of yours who you haven't heard from in twenty years but are hoping to pop in and see them living their best life, because you just wanted to see them happy and safe. But if you know anything about Solar, then there's nothing happy or safe about him.

Thank you for indulging me.

He starts again.

Phil Seleski was going to grow up to be a scientist just like his hero. Every day after school when not neck deep in mathematics textbooks he'd spend his time pouring over the imaginative splendor of Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom.

The chance to be like his hero arrives in his thirties, when he builds a machine that makes wishes come true. There's good science behind it, he'd checked his math more times than he could remember and seen it pass inspection after inspection. But science barely scratches the surface of reality. The math said he'd designed a nuclear reactor to power capable of putting the town of Muskogee, Oklahoma on the map. But deep down in his heart he knew what he'd done.

Late one night, the machine goes haywire. The sight alone saps the hope out of the town who prepare to kiss their loved ones goodbye. But Phil races down the accelerators, the piercing, berserk, gaping maw of infinite possibility. Afraid, yet courageously unaware, he holds closed creation and is baptized in thermonuclear fire. Rendered seared and charred to the bone, he becomes transfigured and emerges from the brink of death something more than human.

He has become his hero, a being capable of taking flight and molding the forces of creation, the very atoms that bind and compose all, bending them to his will. Gone is the very need for sleep or hunger, his blood is anything but as his form seizes and constrains, clinging to a familiar image and identity associated with his childhood youth. He has become something incomprehensible and inhuman, living energy given breathe and thought, forming coherent reasoning and capable of descending madness. He has become a god.

Some people cannot stand for him, however, Dr. Erica Pierce gains his confidence and learns of his great power. The danger he poses with his sheer existence is astronomical and those who had once called him friend and colleague take action and flight. But even in the eye of the storm, harried by nuclear weapon and man-made craft, he is too powerful and too new. The potential danger is very real and Phil Seleski can't stop himself. He loses control and Gayle, the woman he loves, dies in his arms. The whole world dies as everything conceived in creation collapses in on itself.

And then…

He starts again.

Phil Seleski was going to grow up to be a scientist like his hero. Every day after school when not neck deep in mathematics textbooks he'd spend his time pouring over the imaginative splendor of Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom.

Late one night, the machine goes haywire. The sight alone saps the hope out of the town who prepare to kiss their loved ones goodbye. But Phil races down the accelerators, the piercing, berserk, gaping maw of infinite possibility. Afraid, yet courageously unaware, he holds closed creation and is baptized in thermonuclear fire. But there is no pain or death, nor is there any fantastic transformation. Out of the hole emerges a holdover from a now dead world and Phil Seleski comes face to face with Dr. Phil Seleski, Solar, Man of the Atom.

Phil Seleski has a thousand questions, but the reactor is still going into meltdown. Solar makes him an offer. Not only will the crisis be averted but he promises him power and knowledge, the abilities of his childhood hero. All that he asked in return was his life back, a second chance to be human again. Without even a second thought of doubt, Phil Seleski agrees and the two merge becoming one and the same. Dr. Phil Seleski, Solar, Man of the Atom.

It seemed as though Solar had a reprieve from the insanity that had befallen his life. However, there was more to this valiant new world than there would appear. Aliens were among the populace, a strange sentient yet murderous species known as the Spider Aliens were working in secret to make livestock of the world. If that wasn't enough, there was the unsettling emergence of individuals gifted with unnatural abilities. A man named Toyo Harada and his Harbinger Foundation aimed to cultivate these young people to one day take over the world. Solar did what he could. The Spider Aliens demanded his attention, as did Harada. There would be no peace unless both were eradicated. So, he set to work besting extraterrestrial foes and matching wits with Harada's mind games.

When he'd created the black hole that destroyed the other world, Solar had thought that had been the end of it. He was wrong. Having gained powers similar to his own, Erica Pierce had crossed over to this new one. Crazed, driven mad by her time in the black hole and by her new grasp of reality, she killed her doppelganger and abducted her son, hiding out into the 41st century when technology would finally catch up to a point of her desire, she cultivated a technological empire and transported it to the fabled Lost Land, a place within unreality existing outside of time.

Pulled into the future by Pierce, Solar was helpless against the amassed forces in combination to Mothergod's own considerable centuries of experience. Trapped in a space of unreality, he was forced to relive the cruel life of his before his relocation into the new earth. But Pierce's machinations hadn't only brought Solar to the future, other champions from the present were rallied behind Earth's Geomancer and began to mount an offense. Pierce, now calling herself Mothergod, laid waste to the future, pushing the world's defenders to the brink until Solar could be freed.

Their battle rocked the galaxy as Solar held against a considerable foe. Manifesting a wormhole, he trapped Mothergod in the same unreality prison he'd been subjected to. Engulfing the blackhole intended to unmake the universe, Solar destroyed the Lost Land and sent the survivors back to their respective time periods.

Wounded from his exploits, he catches the curiosity of Fred Bender, a corporate investigator by trade, Bender follows the breadcrumbs with ease to Seleski's front door. He confronts Solar, wanting to know of his power, how he performs his divine acts and whether it can be shared. Solar wants nothing to do with him, yet Bender gets the better of him, stealing part of his power for his own and running away. What began as a simple act of curiosity turned into an act of stealing fire from a god. The power runs through his veins and he quickly gives into human impulses, killing those who've wronged him and forcing himself on an unsuspecting populace.

Torn by the interference into his personal life, Solar resolved to handle Bender, if not for the chaos he created then for the sake of his pursuit of a normal life with Gayle. Relocating their fight to the Maelstrom, a place beyond reality, where atoms burned and sang. Where Solar once stood against a being of his measure with years over him, he now dueled against one who now paled in comparison to his own. It would hardly be considered a battle. He was swift and cold, he was cruel and belittling. He stole back his power and removed Bender to nowhere, far from civilization in an inhospitable desert. He could have left him trapped within the Maelstrom or unmade him entirely, both were within his power. But he held onto some ideal that dictated this action to be just then departed. He should've killed him, it would have saved him a lot of trouble in the end.

He'd suffered great mental stress in those days, it was too much to bare even for a being of pure energy such as he. The walls of his fragile mind crumbled under Master Darque's evil magics, using him like a sponge to gather more power. To escape his influence, Solar had done the unthinkable and channeled his anger and rage, severing the controlling link by shunting off these raw emotions into their own person. On the eve of calamity, Solar, The Destroyer, was born. The warrior inside the physicist, the repressed super ego of a larger than life energy being, the one who would kill all the Spider-Aliens and ensure the safety of the world until the end of time.

But with the birth of The Destroyer came the decline. Solar was already feeling his humanity wane, with the most raw and ideal aspects of his being torn and spun off into their own man, he was now less than what he once was. He still had command over the atoms, the very makeup of existence, and yet, he could not sustain those relationships that had given Phil Seleski's life meaning.

A friends would die, rather than cope, Solar would resurrect them. Playing god, he'd infuse them with his power, turning them into a mad abomination that would demand to die rather than live their sham of a non-life. The powers would cross the boundaries, forcing Solar into developing all new personas through which to exist as. And each of these lives, those he'd meet would get sucked into his growing madness and get hurt or worse.

In the end, what even was Gayle to him? Their time together has left the woman scared and worried. She's just an object to him, a moral leash to tether The Man of the Atom to his humanity. But she can't be that. She can't just be the woman from those old comic books, she can't be the woman who died along with that other world. He's suffocating, trapping her in his life, in his misery. It's not like the comic books or the movies, her life stagnates as she's expected to wait up for him like his pretty pictures. She needs to be her own person first and foremost. And finally the acknowledgment of his actions destroys him. He's not a man, he's barely even a person.

And then…

He Starts again.

Phil Seleski was never going to grow up to be a scientist like his hero. Even after spending every day after school neck deep in some mathematics textbooks, he knew deep in his heart he'd never be anything like Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom. Despite his genius, he knew he'd never make anything fantastical, rather instead decided to keep himself grounded to reality. Happily married to his college sweetheart and the father of two wonderful kids, Phil would never have asked for anything else.

The world was something of a paradise. All the world's incredible problems were solved by cape clad wonders such as the longtime 'special', The Urban Assault Commando, and his Presidentially backed super team known as Flashpoint. It was a world where truth and justice were clear as day.

But then they'd caught sight of him and then Phil Seleski's life would be changed forever. By chance, the world's premier special team had come across a being that they could only conclude to be their 'God'.

Through great technological means, the specials had made contact with this supposed god, and read its mind. Gleaming from its depths its identity to be that of Seleski's. They arrived at his doorstep, either demanding answers or revering him as some sort of mythical deity. But all Phil wanted was his simple, ordinary, mundane life. He wanted nothing to do with these colorful characters and wished that they'd interfere with his family no longer.

Plucked from a dire situation, Seleski came face to face with this supposed god, and much to his surprise, he looked as though he could have been his own twin. Solar had made the world from scratch.

Billions of years old, Solar had travelled back to the beginning of time in another universe. He'd watched the birth of stars, the passing of planetoids and the crafted in his hands the world that Seleski lived in today. He wanted something that had eluded him for so long, he wanted to remake the world that he'd destroyed, but in doing so he'd made one so much unlike it.

Following the assassination of the president by a man dressed as Solar, The Urban Assault Commando saw no other option but to retaliate. Their bout was fleeting, though spared the savage fury of nuclear fire, Seleski was thrown into the heat of battle as the specials came upon their meeting. The Urban Assault Commando, America's, if not the world's greatest champion, was felled by a technological marvel meant to kill Solar. Broken by his supposed God's words, of knowledge he'd sought to keep hidden from the world, the crusading Sin Buster turned his blade against Seleski, running him through.

Leaving Flashpoint broken by their terrible deeds, Solar returned Seleski's body to his wife. He reminisced of the world, how he'd lived vicariously through them. It was a therapy of his own making to find his forsaken humanity. But she'd cursed him, not only for her husband's death but for the sick inhuman lack of consideration. Who gave him the right to play God?

And then…

He starts again.

Frank and Helena Seleski were twins who ran through the gauntlet of life together. Their upbringing was twisted, their father was a harsh man who quoted scripture to friends and colleagues but was a devil to his children, their mother was submissive and complacent under the holy book, turned a blind eye to her husband's hungry stare. One day in their teens, their old man was found hanging from the ceiling. Looking for reason in such senseless misfortune, Frank found comfort in the pages of scientific theory and cultivated a passion to seek out and claim the unknown, to be a God of his own. Helena wanted to make sense of the world, she searched for lost secrets, hidden messages in the old book, hoping someday she'd learn how to destroy God.

They'd found prophecy, that in the very near future their world would end and that it would be heralded by the return of God. The world was changing at a breakneck pace. People of science, baffled by the impossible, found certainty at the bottom of a bottle or at the end of a gun. Men of faith renounced their religion and gave into vices, their god had made them to give himself meaning,

They'd come face to face with their maker, Solar.

It was Heisenburg's Principle. He traveled back through time and the universes split as a result. This world, the second of one world's division, had resulted in the birth of these twins. Their existence was by design, Solar truly was their god in a sense. He'd built up too much power, ascended to a level beyond even godhood at the further cost of his already dwindling humanity. Call him nostalgic, but he'd wanted it back, all those eons left roaming the nothingness of space, all he wanted was the world he once knew, the one he'd destroyed. To get it back, he shed his power and left it to the Seleski twins before vanishing once more.

Frank and Helena were ill equipped to handle their shared godhood. It was too much power for either of them. The slightest miscalculation of its application could sunder the world. They were both damaged individuals, living off codependency, their own Armageddon in the making. The abuse they'd endured as children had subconsciously bled into their powers, willing into creation the death of all things.

Unstable and proving to be a clear and present danger to all, the world's governments embarked to kill the Seleski twins. Their efforts were fruitless, the works of man could never stand against the power of god, let alone a mad one. They wanted it to end, they desperately wished for the fighting to stop, so they reached out with their power and tore Solar back into their world and demanded he take back the power.

Solar had little time for their madness. He tore into them, how they deep down they both hated each other, over Frank's killing of their abusive father, replacing him as Helena's abuser and god. Denying their request, Solar cast them out and returned to his roaming undisturbed. He still had much to do if he wished to find his humanity and he knew he would not find it here amongst these deluded mess of siblings.

He starts again.

And again.

…How tiresome.

It begins with nothingness. Two hands glide through the emptiness and collide. Clutching, cusping the immaterial, clenching the very concept of nonexistence between the friction of palms. Then, there is reaction. There is light and the idea of the beginning is born. Infinite potential.

But what is infinite potential to a weary god?

How many times has he been through this now? How many eons has he spent trying to find perfection? How many worlds did he leave behind in his wake?

The new universe is stillborn in hands of nothingness. The potential for life and all that comes with it is tossed aside, a forgotten idea.

Thinking, floating in the nonexistent space of what should have been a sea of fast-moving stars and nebulae. He stands with arms stretched out, hugging the absence of light, like how he did when he held Gayle all those years before, right before he broke down and killed the whole world. That was way back, at the beginning, back when he'd first gotten his powers, when his magic machine granted him his deepest desire.

His deepest desire? What a joke.

He'd wished to be a comic character from his childhood. When kids like himself huddled beneath their desk during drills under the threat of nuclear war. He'd modeled his dreams after a man whose story was meant to reflect the dangers of such cataclysmic forces, and his motivation to ensure that no one ever dare inflict a comparable harm against the world.

Solar had wished to be his comic book hero and yet, looking back on it now, he recognized that he hadn't even become that. He'd become something different, something that perverted the original concept and unrecognizable.

"Catch you at a bad time, Philly-boy?" A feint, mocking voice asks. ring of dulled yellow light, radiating energy against a backdrop of bleak nothingness. A sickly black ink form, peaks along the edges of a perceived immaterial horizon.

Fred Bender. Doctor Eclipse.

The sight of him is enough to give Solar pause. The last that he'd seen Bender had been centuries prior, during another of his attempts to recreate his world. He'd tried to trap him unreality, but the deluded fool had split himself apart at Ravenus' touch. He'd thought him dead, but seeing him ooze out of the dawn of time was enough to prove his existence and likewise reinforce Solar's failure.

This was Master Darque's doing. Solar reminded himself. The necromancer who had felled his mind had sensed the remnants of his power attached to Bender and collected him, turning the sycophant into the perverse monster before him. An energy being, but of another sort, of powers most dark, he still reeks of countless deaths and atrocities which fuel his existence.

"What? Nothing to say to a dear old friend?" He says feigning offence.

The moment has passed. "Bender. I killed you. How are you here?"

"God is supposed to be omnipotent and all seeing. Shouldn't you already know?" Illuminated only by the dancing flames radiating out of the ring from his chest, the image of his namesake, Solar can make out the image of a cruel shadowy smile. "Oh, that's right. You're not god, Seleski. You're something else, something less than and something worse.

"Everything was alright until you came along. You and that stupid red suit and upside-down radiation symbol. Terribly dressed and terribly mannered, you tripped your way into an incalculable genocide. You're never going to get it back, Seleski. You can try and try all you want, but you poor emotionally disturbed fool, you'll never turn back the clock to 1991."

"How dare you!" He shouts into the immaterial void of nothingness. Solar's power is great and he has indulged this psycho long enough. He reaches outward, with a fraction of effort, and clamps a hand around Bender's oily throat.

"There he is! There's the unstable little shit!" The once and former man of bone and blood, now of vitriol and tainted spite, cackles like a hyena in heat.

"I will unmake you."

"No, you won't! You can't!" More laughter fills the darkened stretch of untapped cosmos. "I'm your antithesis, Seleski! Master Darque voodoed me into this creature that you can't kill! That you won't kill. Sure, you've tried, but did you really? You threw your chest around and made a big show of trapping Ravenus in unreality. But really? I was just a problem you wished would just go away.

"Then I did, letting you go and spend a beautiful carefree millennium screwing with how many lives? Do they even have a word for that many people? But I'm back now. Back to do what I was made to: ruin your life. Too bad you've done that already. Give yourself a round of applause, Seleski. No one screws up as big as you do. So, I had to do the next best thing and mess with everything else."

"What did you do, Bender." He threatened more than questioned. Solar's grip tightened, rippling, sending reverberating shockwaves into the time before life and units of measured distance.

"Hrk-! Nothing much." That awful smile of his grew. "I gave someone an idea. In their lowliest of moments. A quiet whisper in their ear. 'It'll work', I said. 'It'll work'. That's all. Cross my heart and hope to die."

"Who did you talk to?!" Solar shouts, the first raised voice to exist. He can feel the dark energy dripping from the creature in his hands

"You're really upset for someone whose left all those worlds behind. They weren't perfect enough for you, so why do you care?"

Refusing to give the slimy wretch any further satisfaction, Solar relinquishes his hold over the former man and shoves apart from him.

"I was the best private investigator around. With even the minimal of details I could piece together the most elaborate of conspiracies. I had the corporate elite and corrupt politicians of the world eating out of my palm. I found what you left behind and I've turned it on its head. I'm the flaw in all your works, Seleski. The fly in the ointment with a devilish grin. Wrecker of your shit."

"That's enough out of you."

Two hands, larger than comprehension, collide around Doctor Eclipse and clutch the inky black wretch between its palms. Amongst the immaterial and brimming potential, he thrashes and claws in fruitless gestures. All it takes is a modicum of effort, of ethereal compression and intention.

Then, there is light. A universe is born.

Bender's cries and revulsion fall deaf to the ensuing chaos. Matter cascades and envelopes the nothingness, filling the unnamed and untamed with exploding super-heated gas and streaking planetoids. It is a moment of new beginnings, that the future will be billions of years in the making, and perhaps this time Solar will get it right. Perhaps, but it is not certain. Nothing ever is.

And that thought gives Solar pause.

The full-frontal force of the Big Bang should be enough, certainly more than necessary, but for a man like Bender it just felt right. However, Solar has his doubts. Bender was right, Master Darque had changed him in such a way rendering him impervious to any sort of death blow. It is a magic seeped within the innermost laws of science, making him the perfect thorn in Solar's side, just as Darque had intended.

But for all his raving, the once and former man had raised a fair question. Why would Solar act in such rage over the worlds that he'd abandoned? He'd spent the years trying to recreate what had been lost. It was certainly a tall order, and all those worlds had been failures in his eyes.

What do the lives of men matter to a god such as he?

Solar floats there in the afterbirth of a universe asking himself that very question, wondering what to do with himself.

Back issues, comic book store dollar bins, have a way of showing someone what they missed and should never be taken for granted. It's taken me years to piece together the entire Valiant and Acclaim run and I have a great admiration for what Jim Shooter had intended. If you haven't already looked into the behind the scenes story of his time at Marvel through Valiant and Defiant, you're really doing yourself a disservice. I could write all about my theories about how the 90s were the result of the absence of Jim Shooter at Marvel as well as his presence at Valiant with that novelty cover of Solar, Man of the Atom #10's Barry Windsor Smith all black cover, but really, it's the end of the chapter and who cares about my ramblings?

Some fun trivia, an earlier draft had mentioned Jimmy Six from the Acclaim years. But, after re-reading those issues of Hell on Earth, I realized my understanding of Jimmy Six was completely inaccurate and just decided to bypass that mess completely. As if Solar would bother knowing that bullshit.

Until next time. Whenever that is.