COMIC DETAILS
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Comic Description:
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Atom 20 Universal
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Grade:
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9.8
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Page Quality:
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WHITE
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Pedigree:
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Twin Cities
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Certification #:
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0915196012
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Owner:
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Mississippi Mudcats
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SET DETAILS
Owner's Description
Issue #20 features a Maya appearance. In “Challenge of the Computer Crooks!" Ray invites his Jean to show off the "Stool Pigeon", a computer that he has built that can analyze the facts of a crime and determine, via punch cards identifying the Modus Operandi of a crime and link it to a particular group of criminals. For fun, Jean asks Ray to program the computer to see if it agrees that they should get married. To their surprise, it says that they shouldn't get married no matter the cost, however Jean dismisses the notion and Ray decides that the machine needs to have some bugs worked out of it.
Staying late to fix the problem, Ray leaves that night only to be jumped by a bunch of masked crooks who knock him out and lock him up in his labs broom closet. The crooks turn out to be a gang who have learned of the computers existence and want to exploit it's ability to identify their M.O. in order to avoid making it in the future so that they are more difficult to catch. Overhearing their plans from the broom closet, Ray changes into Atom and attacks them. Although he has the element of surprise, he is knocked out when he is almost crushed by a falling microscope and is forced to shrink down to microscopic size to avoid getting hit.
The crooks quickly recover and flee the scene, and are long gone when Atom revives from the attack. Searching the lab, he finds no forensic evidence revealing their identities. However, he recalls how he was tied up, the crook who did so used a stevedore knot to tie his shoes, and that one of them had a tattoo of a bowling ball and pins on his slower arm. Deducing that one of the crooks must be a member of a local bowling club, he decides to stake them out as the Atom.
Staking out local bowling alleys gives him a lead when he notices one of the bowlers playing has the same tattoo and ties his shoes in the same fashion. Hitching a ride on the crooks body, Atom hides out in the mans apartment until he leaves to commit another crime.
Sure enough, when the crooks commit their next crime, a safe cracking, they inadvertently bring the Atom along for the ride, who easily smashes up the operation and holds the crooks at gun point until the police arrive.
Later, having repaired his machine, he once more runs it for Jean to see if they should be married and are happy when it gives them the desired answer: A resounding yes.
Our WP 9.8 comes from the Twin Cities Collection and is the single highest graded example in the Census. Gary Dahlberg spent his life carefully buying, reading and storing comic books away throughout the '60s and '70s, with aspirations to become a cartoonist one day. Sadly, he died in a fire in 2010, but to the astonishment of his family his collection was appraised at more than $1 million by Heritage, who auctioned the books in 2011. Consisting of mainly Marvel and DC, this accumulation has no identifying marks but yielded some of the highest grades of the early Marvel period with considerably high page quality. The collection ultimately brought over $2.4 million at auction.
We acquired this beauty off E-Bay on 7/25/2018.
2022 Update: Unfortunately, there is now a second 9.8 in the census, which is being auctioned in the CL Fall Featured Auction.
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