Armageddon: The Alien Agenda # 1-4 (DC Comics) (Ltd. 1991) [COMICS]

After the debacle of Armageddon 2001, DC nonetheless tried to cash in with a couple of subsequent mini series.  The first one out was Armageddon: The Alien Agenda, a four issue limited series that follows Captain Atom and Monarch after they've been blasted back in time by the former's climactic atomic explosion at the end of the big crossover.

In Issue # 1, we find out that Captain Atom has been blasted all the way back to the dinosaur age!  (I know, I know, that's a completely unscientific descriptor since dinosaurs occupied the Earth for millions of years).  Anyway, a T-Rex tries to make a meal of of the silver stud, but obviously fails.  Then, Hawk/Monarch (40 year old spoiler alert!) attacks.  And then it turns out there is an alien base on Earth!  The aliens initially pretend to be friendly, but secretly they plan to blow up the entire solar system (because it interferes with an ongoing war they have with another alien race).  Cap uses a bomb on the alien base/fleet, but the resulting explosion blasts him all the way into Roman Empire times, and he arrives, unarmored, before hostile legionnaires during Nero's reign!  Honestly, it's pretty crappy, Saturday morning cartoon style stuff.  Hawk/Monarch has hardly any personality, the alien invaders are pretty silly, and the time-travel stuff is pretty cliché.  But a serious reader never gives up, so on to the next instalment.

Issue # 2 has the drama of Cap's powers flickering on and off as he (of course) is forced to be a gladiator and fight hungry lions.  Triumphing, he becomes Nero's favorite.  "Meanwhile", back in dinosaur times, we learn that the hostile aliens need Captain Atom to act as a detonator to open a wormhole, so they put Monarch and a pair of their own into suspended animation to wait out millennia to "catch up" to Captain Atom.  But Atom triggers another explosion in a fight and is blasted all the way forward into the Old West, just in front of a stampede! (the explosion causes Rome to burn, so Nero must fiddle).  Again, pretty silly.  I also find the printing pretty poor, making the art hard to follow.

In Issue # 3, classic cowboy characters turn up as Atom stumbles into town.  There's a two-page bar brawl sequence that is genuinely really fun.  Another explosion sees Atom apparently start the great San Francisco fire before getting blasted into a Nazi camp during World War II.  (Geez, he's got some bad luck!)  Meanwhile, Hawk/Monarch and the aliens continue trying to catch up to him.  Hawk/Monarch seems to just be classic Hawk personality, with no real trace of all the stuff that led him to becoming Monarch and slaughtering all of Earth's heroes during the "future" side of the big crossover.  It's really poorly written in that respect.

Captain Atom, in his human form as Nathaniel Adam, is interrogated by the Nazis before being thrown into a concentration camp in Issue # 4.  He bonds with some children there and powers up to set them free.  Meanwhile, generation after generation of aliens in a secret dome have come and gone, and eventually they've started to believe that the ones frozen in suspended animation have mythical/religious significance.  Somehow, Monarch/Hawk and Captain Atom end up on an island that has a secret (1944) atomic bomb test!  The explosion hurtles Atom all the way to the present, where we are promised "The All-New Captain Atom Returns! Coming to a Comics Rack Near You Soon!"  I'm pretty sure that's a bald-faced lie.  We don't learn (in this series) what happened to Monarch.  And obviously, the aliens didn't succeed in destroying the Earth.

My overall verdict: eminently skippable.