Save The Tiny Titans! How about… The Particles??

Totally self-indulgent Comic-Nerd fantasy pitch here.

THE PARTICLES: The Atom, Nuklon, Bumblebee, and Microbe:

An experiment with a ‘Dwarf Star fragment’ gone wrong causes serious changes in a roomful of STAR Labs employees. As a result, they become an in-house exploration group for the parent company, and on their own they still manage to get into action/trouble. Sort of a FF for DC with a dash of Pym Particles:

Prof. Ray Palmer becomes The Atom, able to shrink to sub-atomic size with the ability to adapt to any of the environments in-between. He’s an incurable adventurer who is more comfortable being in the world under the Petri dish than looking into it.

Prof. Ryan Choi is Microbe, able to shrink down to an inch in size, yet retain the strength of himself at full size. A keen scientific mind with a charming demeanor and a reluctant passenger on a constant strange voyage.

Dr. Karen Beecher is the MIT grad newbie who gains the ability to also shrink down to an inch, but can also fly. A tech prodigy, she creates her own laser blasting stingers and becomes Bumblebee. She’s very in-charge personality wise and can be really, really bossy and hot-headed towards her team-mates.

Al Rothstein is a custodian at STAR Labs, who becomes Nuklon. Unlike the others, he grows in size instead of shrinking. He also has an explosion-impact power that occurs when he hits, kicks, or punches. He dropped out of high school to support his mom and sibs, and sees the act of being a super-hero in a very prideful fashion. He hates not being able to join his fellows on their ‘tiny adventures’, but when left to his own devices he always manages to find something to get into. He’s street-wise and heavy on horse-sense and very much the heart-and-soul of the group.

Lastly, there’s Sylbert Rundyne, a visiting Physics consultant who disappears as if atomized during the accident. He later turns up demented and psychotic and calling himself Dwarf-Star. He can now shrink or grow indefinitely and is bent on killing any and all other great scientists he can. He claims to have seen something on his ‘time away’ and believes he knows what needs to happen to the world if he can get all the obstacles out of his way.

Save the Bumblebee! Why No Buzz?

Karen Beecher came along in ’76 in the Teen Titans. OK, first, her name is not “Black Bumblebee”. Second, a Black Female character who is also a scientist AND developed her own tech. Third, she’s Mal Duncan’s girlfriend, and her powers set trumps his.Lastly, she looks KILLER in all of her visual variations. Win, win, win.

Mal was a (sorry, but…) token used to give weight to the late ’60s Teen Titans attempt to be socially relevant when they ditched their costumes and tried to be all revolutionary. He wound up becoming The Guardian when the group made a comeback complete with secret IDs once more, and that got done away with by his forgettable “Hornblower” persona, which to me, was as racially silly as the “weapons filled afro” dude from the Super Globetrotters.

The ‘bee was a scientist of color long before Mr. Terrific came along, and yet, has never been tapped as a substantial supporting character (moreso on the Young Justice cartoon than in comics), much less as a lead. She and Mal were briefly members of a short-lived Doom Patrol line-up, which was actually kinda cool. The whole reason the two of them made the cut was that Karen became trapped at a 4 inch height, and Mal, now called “Vox” had been impaled in the same disaster that rendered Karen to be stuck in the diminutive form, and needed a voice box to speak, which made them acceptable in the ‘incurable freak’ category of the Doom Patrol membership statement. In the New 52, neither have yet to be seen.

The current incarnation of The Titans is so forgettable and disconnected from what the team is even supposed to be about, and here we are with another member of the team who never even got the chance to get fleshed out and fully realized. Yet another female marginalized and ignored by a company that’s vision seems so distorted at this point, and so stubborn about expanding the horizons of their intellectual properties. Here we are with a character who stands out as a woman, a person of color, and a lovely blank palette just ready to be colored with creativity. Save the Bumblebee!

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