From Morrison's mind: Death of The All-New Atom

So what happened with our new Atom after Simone's run ended? Looking at the title of this post we can already see that fate wasn't kind to Ryan.

But before we get to that we have to cover few other things. Simone's run had two fill-ins and they were good fill-ins. Good in a sense that they advanced the main plot of the series and their one and done stories weren't bad. But I didn't find the main plot well executed even before Countdown derailed everything. If you liked what Simone was doing then they are worth checking out, otherwise? Not really.

After Simone left we got a new writer - Rick Remender, and I'm not sure what DC was really thinking here. Simone's run didn't end with good sales numbers so were they really expecting that Remender, who wasn't well known at the time, was going to turn the ship around in couple of issues? So what happened is that the title got canceled after 5 issues. But were those issues good?

It is hard to judge them since Remender basically blew up previous status quo and tried to build a new one. I think this decision made sense since the ongoing wasn't really working before, but what does it matter if nothing was done with the new status quo? And just like those fill-ins this story arc wasn't good enough to stand on its own.

So yeah, ongoing ended, but what about guest appearances? Ryan didn't get many where he wasn't just in a crowd shot and the ones he got weren't spectacular either, looking at you Cry for Justice. So anyway, best one is probably his team up with Hawkman in Waid's Brave and the Bold #9. Unfortunately it is only 1/3 of the issue and part of a year long storyline so it doesn't make much sense to pick it up unless you are interested in Waid's run in general.

He also had few panels in Final Crisis. I'm bringing it up only because Ryan mentions how he should get a new name because Palmer is back as Atom as well. It is rather funny that Morrison thought that sharing the name is a problem back in 2009, while 15 years later multiple characters having same name is considered a new normal.

So yeah, here comes Titans special where Dwarfstar (villain created in Simone's run) hires Deathstroke and his "Titans" to kill Ryan. Thinking here probably was that since Palmer was back and Ryan, more or less, flopped he can be killed to show that Deathstroke means business. But then they go with the generic "hero fights back against multiple threats before being taken out" and to me this never really works. Despite "respectful" showing Ryan's fans are still upset that he got killed and Deathstroke's team doesn't end up looking good either.

That would be that for Ryan till years later Convergence event brought back various old versions of the characters. And Tom Peyer figured that he needs to fix this death by revealing that Ryan's consciousness or whatever escaped to some plane of existence where Atom's mass is shifted when he shrinks in size. I have no idea if this is some old idea from Palmer's stories or something new, but Peyer didn't manage to sell it and the whole story was underwhelming.

In the end nothing really worthwhile was done with this version of Ryan Choi, but maybe he got better luck during DC's Rebirth relaunch? But that is a story for another time.