There are a couple more of the headlining DC All In miniseries that I’ve yet to read, but I’ve got the main Justice League-tied ones now — Question: All Along the Watchtower, Challengers of the Unknown, and now Justice League: The Atom Project (plus Black Lightning: The Standard). Uniformly, I think, these were rough — all of them with their high points, but with lows that suggested to me more needed to cook. The writers by no means lack credentials — here, Ryan Parrott and John Ridley(!) — but none are constant DC contributors, and I get the same sense here of everyone being in the tryout phase as I do for some of the recent event anthology titles.

To wit, Atom Project bills itself as a spy thriller, though really a bunch of characters running around does not a spy thriller make — there’s no particular intrigue here, no bait-and-switch; the good guys and bad guys are obvious from the beginning and remain that way through the end. The story goes back and forth in time over a couple weeks, ostensibly to get us into the “chase” part of the story while the earlier, calmer time still unfolds. But, I think the result is both confusing storytelling in general and also to make the “downtime” less suspenseful since we know what’s coming. There’s shades of The Fugitive, with Nathanial “Captain Atom” Adams as our Harrison Ford, but never anything to take your breath away.

Atom Project is a good DC citizen, dipping in and out of the events of Justice League Unlimited Vol. 1: Into the Inferno. That comes with its own complications, though, and I stop just short of saying that if you’re reading Unlimited, then you should read Atom Project too, only because it remains to be seen whether the next volume of Unlimited acknowledges the events here or ignores them altogether. I appreciate that it’s all connected — Question and Challengers, Unlimited and Atom Project — though so far none of that has risen to the level to sell the books if you weren’t already thinking of buying.

Dawn of DC, with the ubiquitous meddling of Amanda Waller and Peacemaker … felt stronger out of the gate?

[Review contains spoilers]

It’s inspired simply that Atom Project brings together the Atom, the Atom, and Captain Atom — despite their common names, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Ray Palmer nor Ryan Choi together with Captain Atom. We have had Ray and Ryan together before, though thinking back to a couple of “Search(es) for Ray Palmer,” I’m also not sure we’ve seen them in quite this capacity, both Atoms, both scientists on equal footing. Ray is the heel for most of the book, “doing his duty” to wrangle Captain Atom out of, we learn toward the end of the book, his sense of constantly being lesser than the rest of the League and wanting to make a real difference. In this, at least implicitly, I thought Parrott and Ridley did well alluding to some of the mental health challenges Ray has had over the years. Unfortunately, on the other side, as the “do right” guy, Ryan is offered less depth overall — he knows the right thing and he does it, and that’s basically all for Ryan.

Captain Atom also has an arc through and out the other side of doing his duty. Again though, I felt the nonlinear way in which the story unfolded made it harder to follow Nathanial’s progression, nor did I feel quite gripped enough to want to flip back and forth to understand it. At a certain point Nathanial is using his new power-transferring ability to give American soldiers superpowers on the Justice League Watchtower, something that feels rather doubtful the League would allow, and at the behest no less of General Wade Eiling, someone both the audience and the (shrinking) Atoms know to be something of a villain. So while indeed Captain Atom, too, is dealing with what’s expected of him versus what he ultimately sees as right, the audience so clearly sees the right answer as to make it not all that interesting.

Not to mention that between Eiling and the villain Major Force, Parrott and Ridley are too much playing Captain Atom’s greatest hits. On one hand, a Captain Atom story is as a Captain Atom story does; on the other hand, using Major Force and Eiling feels predictable, like the creative team didn’t get quite past Nathanial’s Who’s Who page. Artist Mike Perkins' ink-forward depictions of Captain Atom put me in mind of Marc Campos' Captain Atom, which of course had me thinking of Extreme Justice; I was disappointed we didn’t get a sequence of Nathanial’s blended history across continuities like we saw for the Challengers and etc. At times, too, Perkins' Captain looks like the flame-headed New 52 version, but again, nothing doing. Nor again is much real color added to Ray or Ryan — no Jean Loring or Hawkman, no Giganta or Killer Frost (despite the opportunity for an easy crossover with John Layman’s Titans).

It all comes together, for better or worse, when Atom Project begins to more heavily name-check Inferno, the mysterious group that’s been giving Justice League Unlimited fits. Indeed, at Atom Project’s six issues versus the Unlimited Vol. 1 collection’s five, Atom ultimately blows right through Unlimited’s revelation of Inferno as a time-displaced Legion of Doom and into We Are Yesterday where some of the Leaguers have disappeared. It’s not the creative team’s fault — I’m sure this all read swimmingly month-to-month — but Atom geting ahead of Unlimited’s trades (the We Are Yesterday trade followed Atom Project by a couple of weeks) makes the end of the Atom collection mildly confusing. We don’t know why half the League is missing between issues, for one, and for two, Atom introduces a new(?) Legion of Doom member and doesn’t even give us her name until 10 pages in, the series here counting a bit too much on the audience reading (or having access to) all the DCU titles.

So, to say again, on its face Ryan Parrott and John Ridley’s Justice League: The Atom Project is somewhat skippable, short only of the fact that it’s cool to see all the Atoms get a spotlight both individually and together. Secondary to that is whether Mark Waid’s Batman/Superman: World’s Finest/Justice League Unlimited crossover will specifically give a nod to Atom Project or not. We’ve yet to even see Captain Atom on the page in Unlimited, so it’s really up in the air how much this tertiary title will tie in; if a lot, then maybe that’s another reason to pick this up. (Very barely, as it turned out, hardly enough to count.)

Perhaps it’s still early days yet, but Dawn of DC went straight out of the gate from Dark Crisis to Lazarus Planet, and then Knight Terrors almost immediately thereafter. Too many crossovers for some, sure, but at least there was a sense that the DCU was moving and moving quickly. Here we have Justice League Unlimited, We Are Tomorrow, and DC KO, but I don’t yet feel like the same forward momentum has been captured, at least not with the same level of quality. I hope that the next few months change my mind.

[Includes original and variant covers]