History Characters / TheAtom

* BadassBookworm: A university professor and researcher who is also a superhero and member of the Franchise/JusticeLeague.

* HeroesWantRedheads: His primary love interest is FieryRedhead Giganta.
-->'''Ryan (internal monologue)''': Everyone deserves a second chance! Especially redheads!

* HeartIsAnAwesomePower: Turned out shrinking and control of his mass are suprisingly effective villain fighting tools.

* ItsAllAboutMe: Ray would have gotten back together with her in a second if she had simply asked, but since she initiated the divorce it would make her look "weak." This caused her to hatch her plan in ''Identity Crisis.''
* KilledOffForReal: During ''Countdown''.

* ComicBookFantasyCasting: During ''ComicBook/IdentityCrisis'' artist Rags Morales based Jean's appearance on Lesley Ann Warren.

** When he got his powers, they came in the form of raising his baselines so all of the results of all his crazy physical training being enhanced from peak human to superhuman.

* LikeASonToMe: After the villain known as Cyclotron was killed, Al took his pregnant daughter into his care and became godfather to her son, Albert Julian Rothstein, aka Nuklon aka Atom Smasher. In light of the difficulty Al and his wife had conceiving their own child, little Albert was all but their surrogate son, a relationship which carried on into adulthood.

** Thanks to weird time junk, Al ended up being somewhere around eighty-something chronologically and around maybe fifty physically at worst, which thanks to his lifetime of physical training and a boost from our old friend RadiationInducedSuperpowers meant he could keep doin' his thang in the modern age (with a somewhat more generic costume). [[RapidAging Until...]]

* RapidAging: At one point in the 1940s, the JSA and some of their loved ones were exposed to a massive amount of time energy that left them all aging so gracefully that they could still be active superheroes over sixty years later. That is, until the ''Zero Hour'' even, in which Extant stole pretty much all that time energy for himself. Al aged forty years in a second, his now-eighty-odd-years-old body perishing immediately from the strain, and unlike some of his compatriots, hasn't come back. So far.

* MoralityChain: One of the few people modern day Hawkman is consistently nice too.

* TragicVillain: See ForcedIntoVillainy. Also, Terry's daughter Terri was fine, Humanite just tricked him.

* ForcedIntoVillainy: The Ultra-Humanite kidnapped him and deceived him into believing that his own experiments had exposed his daughter to radiation which had left her lethally ill. Terry allowed the Humanite to perform agonizing experiments upon him and fought the All-Star Squadron because UH said he could cure her, but ultimately couldn't bear to let the Humanite continue his schemes and sacrificed his life to stop him.

[[AC:Terry Curtis]]

* TheArtifact: An interesting case. When created in 1940, the atom bomb was still a twinkle in Oppenheimer's eye, so "atom" was a common insult for shrimpy people like Al started out as, his successes were symbolic triumphs of the little guy over people who overlooked him. That changed after the bomb dropped, and subsequent events would give him a SuperStrength "atomic punch".

* IJustWantToBeSpecial: As stated above, Al was originally a BadassNormal who often felt that, in the presence of such heavyweights as Green Lantern or the Flash, he wasn't worth much of anything. Even when comparing himself to other {{Badass Normal}}s, he could still find something to envy, such as Mr. Terrific being able to run faster than him, or Wildcat being a better fighter. The man had an inferiority complex. However, after soaking up some radiation from the Supervillain Cyclotron in 1941, he finally gained Super-Strength from this event years later, in 1945. He was naturally quite thrilled upon this revelation, and yet, he was never quite satisfied...

* LawOfInverseFertility: Al and his wife, who worked at a company called Symbolix, spent their whole marriage even into late middle age attempting to have a child. Al and the rest of the JSA got spirited to a pocket dimension and were forced into an endless battle to keep the forces of Ragnarok from escaping and ravaging our Earth. By the time he got back, Mary's bosses at Symbolix told him that the woman he had been in love with for literally decades had died in an accident along with the unborn baby they had been hoping to meet for almost as long. '''But actually''', Symbolix was a front corporation for ComicBook/VandalSavage who had kidnapped Mary and experimented on the fetus she carried, infusing it with the DNA of every single JSA member. When the baby was born Savage personally suffocated Mary to death, and Symbolix spent some time infusing the infant with bits of DNA from every modern superhero they could get. This baby was placed with a married couple of scientists and named Grant Emerson, later becoming known as the superhero Damage. Al Pratt's ghost probably shakes his head and sighs wearily whenever he hears someone say they want to be a superhero.

* OlderThanTheyLook: Thanks to weird time junk, Al ended up being somewhere around eighty-something chronologically and around maybe fifty physically at worst, which thanks to his lifetime of physical training and a boost from our old friend RadiationInducedSuperpowers meant he could keep doin' his thang the modern age (with a somewhat better costume). [[RapidAging Until...]]

** When he got his powers, the came in the form of all of the results of all his crazy physical training being enhanced from peak human to superhuman.

* RapidAging: At one point in the 1940s, the JSA and some of their loved ones were exposed to a massive amount of time energy that left them all aging so gracefully that they could still be active superheroes over sixty years later. That is, until the ''Zero Hour'' even, in which Extant stole pretty much all that time energy for himself. Al aged forty years in a second, his now-aged body perished immediately from the strain, and unlike some of his compatriots, hasn't come back. So far.

* RapidAging: At one point in the 1940s, the JSA and some of their loved ones were exposed to a massive amount of time energy that left them all aging so gracefully that they could still be active superheroes over sixty years later. That is, until the ''Zero Hour'' even, in which Extant stole pretty much all that time energy for himself. Al aged forty years in a second, died immediately from the strain, and unlike some of his compatriots, hasn't come back. So far.

* RapidAging: At one point in the 1940s, the JSA and some of their loved ones were exposed to a massive amount of time energy that left them all aging so gracefully that they could still be active superheroes over sixty years later. That is, until the ''Zero Hour'' even, in which Extant stole pretty much all that time energy for himself. Al aged sixty years in a second, died immediately from the strain, and unlike some of his compatriots, hasn't come back. So far.

* RapidAging: At one point in the 1940s, the JSA and some of their loved ones were exposed to a massive amount of time energy that left them all aging so gracefully that they could still be active superheroes over sixty years later. That is, until the ''Zero Hour'' even, in which Extant stole pretty much all that time energy for himself. Al ages sixty years in a second, died immediately, and unlike some of his compatriots, hasn't come back. So far.

* LawOfInverseFertility: Al and his wife, who worked at a company called Symbolix, spent over a decade attempting to have a child. Al and the rest of the JSA got spirited to a pocket dimension and were forced into an endless battle to keep the forces of Ragnarok from escaping and ravaging our Earth. By the time he got back, Mary's bosses at Symbolix told him that the woman he had been in love with for literal decades had died in an accident along with the unborn baby they had been hoping to meet for almost as long. '''But actually''', Symbolix was a front corporation for ComicBook/VandalSavage who had kidnapped Mary and experimented on the fetus she carried, infusing it with the DNA of every single JSA member. When the baby was born Savage personally suffocated Mary to death, and Symbolix spent some time infusing the infant with bits of DNA from every modern superhero they could get. This baby was placed with a married couple of scientists and named Grant Emerson, later becoming known as the superhero Damage. Al Pratt's ghost probably shakes his head and sighs wearily whenever he hears someone say they want to be a superhero.

* RadiationInducedSuperpowers: He absorbed energy from a nuclear-powered supervillain, which somehow allowed him to survive an atomic bomb blast, after which he gained his powers.

* LawOfInverseFertility: Al and his wife, who worked at a company called Symbolix, spent over a decade attempting to have a child. Al and the rest of the JSA got spirited to a pocket dimension and were forced into an endless battle to keep the forces of Ragnarok from escaping and ravaging our Earth. By the time he got back, Mary's bosses at Symbolix told him that the woman he had been in love with for literal decades had died in an accident along with their unborn child. '''But actually''', Symbolix was a front corporation for ComicBook/VandalSavage who had kidnapped Mary and experimented on the fetus she carried, infusing it with the DNA of every single JSA member. When the baby was born Savage personally suffocated Mary to death, and Symbolix spent some time infusing the infant with bits of DNA from every modern superhero they could get. This baby was placed with a married couple of scientists and named Grant Emerson, later becoming known as the superhero Damage. Al Pratt's ghost probably shakes his head and sighs wearily whenever he hears someone say they want to be a superhero.

* LawOfInverseFertility: Al and his wife, who worked at a company called Symbolix, spent over a decade attempting to have a child. Al and the rest of the JSA got spirited to a pocket dimension and were forced into an endless battle to keep the forces of Ragnarok from escaping and ravaging our Earth. By the time he got back, Mary's bosses at Symbolix told him that the woman he had been in love with since high school had died in an accident along with their unborn child. '''But actually''', Symbolix was a front corporation for ComicBook/VandalSavage who had kidnapped Mary and experimented on the fetus she carried, infusing it with the DNA of every single JSA member. When the baby was born Savage personally suffocated Mary to death, and Symbolix spent some time infusing the infant with bits of DNA from every modern superhero they could get. This baby was placed with a married couple of scientists and named Grant Emerson, later becoming known as the superhero Damage. Al Pratt's ghost probably shakes his head and sighs wearily whenever he hears someone say they want to be a superhero.