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This post contains spoilers for episode one of Creature Commandos.
When the Creature Commandos disembark a plane in the first episode of the series that bears their name, they think they’ve arrived in a Disney cartoon. Leader Rick Flag Sr. (voiced by Frank Grillo) walks up to a palace, where he’s greeted by Princess Ilana Rostovic (Maria Bakalova) of Pokolistan, a fictional European country.
While Princess Ilana is a new character created for the show, longtime DC Comics fans might recognize her guards. They may not be called Gardner Grayle or Hollis Hobard, but those are the Atomic Knights, one of DC’s strangest yet most persistent side characters.
Creature Commandos presents the DC Universe as never before seen, and not just because the adult animation series launches Gods and Monsters, the inaugural chapter in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s relaunched DC Universe of movies and TV series. Creature Commandos also maps out the world of DC heroes, reimagining concepts, locations, and characters from the company’s almost 100-year history.
The Atomic Knights made their debut in 1960’s Strange Adventures #117, which introduced the team with a hyperbolic caption: “World War III — the great Atomic War — is over… and in it’s wake lies an Earth in ruins!” Written by John Broome and penciled by Murphy Anderson, “The Rise of the Atomic Knights” reads like a standard bit of Cold War era apocalyptic fiction. Atomic weapons have bombed the world back into the medieval period, a wasteland in which (according to the narration), “Might makes right!”
Under the leadership of Gardner Grayle, the Atomic Knights donned armor that had been irradiated for centuries to defend the powerless. They faced off against giant salt creatures and devolved cavemen, and rode on giant mutant Dalmatians. These stories have a certain Silver Age charm to them, but despite co-creating the Hal Jordan Green Lantern and the Barry Allen Flash, John Broome was never the most inventive writer. While the Atomic Knights concept had value, Broome really needed an artist like Gil Kane or Carmine Infantino to bring them to life.
So it makes sense that DC would come back to the Atomic Knights time and again, trying to find a place to plug them in. DC enfolded the Knights into Jack Kirby‘s post-apocalyptic Kamandi stories, which made them a popular background characters. Grayle went toe-to-toe with Hercules in a story by Cary Bates and Walter Simonson and occasionally crossed paths with Superman and Wonder Woman.
Grayle was later reimagined as a modern-day soldier in the U.S. Army who uses a suit developed by STAR Labs to become the Shining Knight of the reformed Seven Soldiers of Victory and then a modern day Atomic Knight, where he crossed paths with the Outsiders.
As a weird Silver Age concept with connections to Jack Kirby, the Atomic Knights are also favorites of Grant Morrison, who reimagined them for his (still underrated!) Final Crisis event. Led by yet another take on Gardner Grayle, the Atomic Knights patrol Nightwing’s city Blüdhaven, after it gets destroyed in an attack by the supervillain Chemo. Written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti and penciled by Dan Jurgens, the 2006 miniseries Battle for Blüdhaven portrays Grayle and the Knights as heroes defending the citizens of the irradiated city against various forces, including the secret organization SHADE. However, this version of the Knights gets devastated by a corrupted Mary Marvel in Final Crisis.
Since then, the Knights have made background appearances alongside Kamandi and other figures from the Great Disaster, and Grayle did pop up in an episode of Black Lightning (played by Boone Platt). But outside of reoccurring in the Convergence crossover, Creature Commandos is the first major Knights appearance in almost two decades.
The Pokolistani warriors in Creature Commandos may use the Atomic Knights style, but they’re not led by Grayle. Instead, their leader is a big goofball called Alexi, whose personality better recalls affable Russian Dmitri Pushkin aka Justice League International member Rocket Red than he does the stoic Gardner.
Still, even in a different form, the inclusion of the Atomic Knights in Creature Commandos bodes well for the new version of the DC Universe that Gunn and Safran have created. They understand that the DC Universe isn’t just a place where godlike figures such as Superman and Wonder Woman walk among us, or where the vigilante Batman guards the night. It’s also a place where benevolent scientists like Will Magnus can create a robot woman who falls in love with him, where the government hires Frankenstein’s monster for black ops missions, and where a chimp is actually the world’s greatest detective.
The combination of medieval chivalry and space age science fiction offered by the Atomic Knights probably isn’t enough to carry its own series. But their inclusion makes the DC Universe more weird and wonderful. Creature Commandos proves that Gunn and Safran get that weirdness and are ready to make the DCEU into something wonderful.
Creature Commandos streams every Thursday on Max.
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