Revamping the Atom

I just had cause to look up Ray Palmer's origin in DC Comics. (I had no idea that Roy Thomas played a small part in his creation.)

Man, a whole lot of stuff happened that I was unaware of.

I mean, I knew about Sword of the Atom. But I didn't know that he had gotten to the point where his powers were intrinsic. Or that he could grow as well as shrink.

Says to me, hey, here's a character with bad sales. We have to do something.

How would you re-vamp the Atom?

I don't have any ideas yet, but if we were going to stick with Ray Palmer-ish:

• Still some kind of scientist, I think.
• He's smart, at least in his area of expertise. So a certain part of it is puzzle solving.
• Shrinking but I don't see growing in that white dwarf theme.

(By the way, his portrayal in the JLU episode "Dark Heart" was lovely.)

There's not a lot else that I consider essential. I mean, I wouldn't make him an anti-vaxxer fringe science theorist (though that might be fun for a character), but he's a pretty white-bread character.

Make Atom a woman or trans or gay or a person of colour.

Actually, shrinking=being overlooked=being a woman or a minority. Thematically you could make it work.

So maybe the Atom as a group: it's a uniform and equipment that gets shared around by this group, so called because they're indivisible (or hoping they are). Sometimes you get science investigation, sometimes you get crimefighting. And they have different body types, so sometimes the Atom interacts with others at six inches of height and sometimes at one centimetre of height, where onlookers can't tell.