Really, making fun of Legion supporting characters is like shooting fish in a barrel slender tube specially-constructed fish-constraining chamber attached directly to the barrel of the gun and removing the necessity to aim. There are plenty of goofy characters throughout Legion history, starting with Matter-Eater Lad and continuing on with classics like Tyr (possessor of the world’s stupidest-looking cyborg arm), Gas Girl (Hero of Lallor, with one of the worst superhero names ever), or of course any of the Wanderers.
But sometimes you just gotta.
SCIENTIST: So we have this new process for creating a superhuman we’d like you to try out.
ATMOS: Excellent! Let’s do it!
SCIENTIST: …don’t you want to know how it works?
ATMOS: Nope! Powers away!
SCIENTIST: Maybe you’d like to know what powers you’ll get?
ATMOS: I’m sure they’re good ones! But tell me anyways.
SCIENTIST: Well, you’ll be able to fly.
ATMOS: Flight! Always good! The standard for any superhero!
SCIENTIST: So you like that.
ATMOS: Why wouldn’t I? Admittedly, I could just get a rocket pack or something. I mean, this is the future.
SCIENTIST: True.
ATMOS: But flying solo has style. So I’m excited about flying. What else am I getting?
SCIENTIST: Well, you’ll get some super-strength.
ATMOS: Fantastic! Super-strength! Again, sort of a generic power, but this time not easily duplicable by science, and I can see where, as a superhero, I might need to punch things very, very strongly.
SCIENTIST: Or open a really tough jar.
ATMOS: It indeed amazes me that even in the 30th century we have not mastered the science of easily opening jars.
SCIENTIST: Your jar-opening skills will be improved approximately ten thousand percent by this process.
ATMOS: Good to know.
SCIENTIST: You’ll be tough, too. You won’t need to breathe in space.
ATMOS: That’s good, because what if I got tired while I was in space and needed to take a moment?
SCIENTIST: …yes. Oh, and you’ll get some nuclear bolts which you can fire from your hands. They’ll blow things up.
ATMOS: Excellent! This sounds like a decent little superhero package you’ve set up here, Doc. Hey, what’s that on that screen there?
SCIENTIST: What, that? …oh, nothing.
ATMOS: Looks like me!
SCIENTIST: Well, yes, it –
ATMOS: …where are my armpits?
SCIENTIST: You don’t really need to worry about –
ATMOS: Doc, come on, where are my armpits in that image of me? Why would you need an image of me minus armpits?
SCIENTIST: Well, if you must know, we think the superheroing process will vaporize them.
ATMOS: Vaporize them?
SCIENTIST: Yes.
ATMOS: That sounds like it’ll hurt.
SCIENTIST: Well, technically they’ll still be there, so it won’t be like you’ll feel them cut away or anything like that. They’ll just infinitely dissolve into seven-dimensional fractal space, and appear to be gone to normal three-dimensional sensory perception.
ATMOS: So it won’t hurt?
SCIENTIST: Define “hurt.”
ATMOS: And how will I put on deodorant now?
SCIENTIST: Well, that’s the clever part. See, the smell of your armpits won’t transfer through the dimensional bleed, so therefore –
ATMOS: Never mind that. That looks freakish, Doc!
SCIENTIST: So? You’ll have superpowers.
ATMOS: Yeah, I’m all for the having superpowers, but I’m going to look weird! How am I supposed to get chicks if I look like an action figure left on somebody’s plasma radiator?
SCIENTIST: Is that really important?
ATMOS: Hell yes it’s important.
SCIENTIST: …well, I’ve got this additional chemical process I could combine into the nutrient bath you take before we activate you in the comet trail. It would give you subliminal hypnotic powers.
ATMOS: Subwhattamal huh now?
SCIENTIST: You could make girls like you.
ATMOS: …isn’t that kind of like date rape?
SCIENTIST: Maybe a little.
(Pause.)
ATMOS: But only a little, right?
SCIENTIST: Definitely.
ATMOS: Okay! Let’s do this thing, Doc!
Tragically, Atmos was killed by B.I.O.N., a later-stage variant of C.O.M.P.U.T.O., in the “Five Years Later” Legion run. His armpits were never found.
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17 users responded in this post
MGK,
First, hope the York strike won’t be too disruptive to your life.
So, Atmos has subliminal hypnosis ability. I remembered seeing in a Legion Annual backstory, and wondered why Dream Girl was acting so strangely around him.
But I have another question, which you, with your vastly superior Legion history skills, might now: wasn’t Gas Girl originally a reader-submission character? And despite the goofy name, she’s rather powerful. When you look at them, from today’s perspective, she and Infectious Lass don’t seem as humorous as they used to — they’re Women of Mass Destruction — chemical and biological agents, if you will. 😉
I guess the mohawk is to draw attention off the seven-dimensional invisible armpits.
I never decided whether Atmos was supposed to be a 30th century Captain Atom, or final proof that for all his story skills, Paul Levitz couldn’t create characters for shit.
Yeah I think apart from her horrible name, Gas Girl should have been a great hero.
I mean certainly better than Atmos, who despite his Superman-like powers still couldn’t get into the Legion, because even hypnosis can’t convince people you’re not a douchebag apparently.
The nice thing about having your armpits cosmically removed is that you lose a fair amount of weight.
The process also appears to have seared off the right side of his beehive hairdo.
Actually Atmos did get into the Legion briefly, offscreen, during the Five Year Gap between the Levitz series and the Five Years Later series. It was a dark time for the Rebellion.
Atmos is probably Exhibit A of “Why overdoing the crutches is bad: it will make your upper throrax disappear”.
He looks like the victim of a horribly botched breast-augmentation surgery.
Mongo: I think you’ve got a point there. It’s not so much that he’s missing his armpits, but that his armpits are actually deeper! Think of the headlock he could give you!
You know it’s the future when even their cosmetic surgeries don’t make sense to our primitive monkey brains. We can’t possibly hope to understand the necessary awesomeness of armpit augmentation.
I smell another Indy movie
Indiana Jones and the Search for Atmos’s Armpits
Atmos is powered by a small sun.
You can guess what the gravity is doing to him.
I’d just like to point out that in the post Zero Hour Legion books, he was part of a team called the Uncanny Amazers. So yeah…
I used to think I was the only one who noticed his lack of armpits. Even when I pointed this out to another Legion-fan friend of mine, he said “it must be an art error.”
Good to know I’m not alone. 🙂
And now that I look more closely, I remember that it’s actually WORSE than lacking armpits. That dark gray area? It’s the INSIDE of the BACK OF HIS COSTUME. His entire chest area is either gone or somehow invisible.
It would have been great if, when he died, he disappeared and his armpits showed up. Like Captain Marvel and Rick Jones, except one of them is armpits.