It’s hard to know where to even begin with this, the third comic released as part of Josh and Samuel Bayer’s All-Time Comics project, but if I had to describe All-Time Comics : Atlas #1 in just one word, that word would be — nuts.

Seriously, this is one of the most batshit-crazy comics I’ve read in a long time. On the one hand, it would be easy enough — and probably accurate — to view it as a particularly amoral and mean-spirited approximation of the “internal struggle” narratives churned out with regularity by “Bronze Age” scribes like Steve Gerber and Don McGregor, emptied of any degree of charm (however accidental, and perhaps visible only in retrospect) those authors imbued their work with. On the other, though, it’s not hard to see it as the kind of comic those guys would have loved to write. At this point, I’m sure…