In the waning days of Google+ (remember that site?) I did a series of superhero-themed posts inspired by Wold-Newton essays with the conceits that there was only one Earth (encompassing both the Marvel and DC and possibly other "universes") and the world tended to work like our own, despite its somewhat altered history. This served to both ground the characters in history--making them more "realistic" and making history stranger! The name for the series was taken from Mark Gruenwald's 1979 fanzine about alternate comic book realities.
Like baby Kal-El, those posts were rescued from the dying G+, and the Flashback Universe seems a good place for some of them to crash!
It took a bit of chutzpah for a guy who almost died in an ant-hill on the occasion of its discovery to name a physic-defying particle for himself, but that’s what Hank Pym did in 1961, and somehow, he got it to stick.
He didn’t get there first, of course. That mad genius Miguelito Loveless tortured James West with shrinking in 1875, but that incident was classified. It’s likely Pym’s own experimentation was spurred by the tragic case of Scott Carey, “the Shrinking Man,” a few years earlier. Or perhaps he had heard of Darrell Dane’s exploits as Doll Man in the 1940s? (The late thirties to late forties were the heyday of chemists and pharmacists inventing super-powering concoctions. They were churning them out like they had soft drinks and tonics in the late 19th Century. There was a brief resurgence of this in the late fifties and early sixties, but by the seventies, the FDA and DEA made sure this was only the province of major corporations and government agencies.). At Ivy University, Ray Palmer was making his discoveries around the same time, isolating the magical particles through a lens made from exotic “dwarf star matter.”
On the subject of dwarf star matter, it seems that South America has the largest supply. Alexander “Dr. Cyclops” Thorkel was shrinking things in his lab in Peru. The radioactive cloud that passed over Scott Carey off the coast of Southern California likely originated in South America. Ray Palmer would later discover a hidden civilization of shrunken alien humanoids in the Amazon rainfrost, purportedly made so by a malfunction in their ship’s drive which used dwarf star matter. Perhaps their crash is the ultimate source?
He didn’t get there first, of course. That mad genius Miguelito Loveless tortured James West with shrinking in 1875, but that incident was classified. It’s likely Pym’s own experimentation was spurred by the tragic case of Scott Carey, “the Shrinking Man,” a few years earlier. Or perhaps he had heard of Darrell Dane’s exploits as Doll Man in the 1940s? (The late thirties to late forties were the heyday of chemists and pharmacists inventing super-powering concoctions. They were churning them out like they had soft drinks and tonics in the late 19th Century. There was a brief resurgence of this in the late fifties and early sixties, but by the seventies, the FDA and DEA made sure this was only the province of major corporations and government agencies.). At Ivy University, Ray Palmer was making his discoveries around the same time, isolating the magical particles through a lens made from exotic “dwarf star matter.”
On the subject of dwarf star matter, it seems that South America has the largest supply. Alexander “Dr. Cyclops” Thorkel was shrinking things in his lab in Peru. The radioactive cloud that passed over Scott Carey off the coast of Southern California likely originated in South America. Ray Palmer would later discover a hidden civilization of shrunken alien humanoids in the Amazon rainfrost, purportedly made so by a malfunction in their ship’s drive which used dwarf star matter. Perhaps their crash is the ultimate source?
