If You're Gonna Do A Funny Animal, It Better Damn Well Be An ATOMIC Funny Animal!!

If I gave you one billion guesses, you could never tell me what was Charlton Comics' most successful title ever:

Atomic Mouse last nearly a decade, and 52 issues. Take that, E-Man and Captain Atom!

Al Fago created Atomic Mouse in 1953. Our rodent hero got some U-235 pills from Professor Invento (!), and he got all powerful and stuff. With his arbitrarily-varying-in-every-story-powers, he protected Mouseville from his arch-enemy, Count Gatto.

Note the slight makeover he received later, with the apparent hand-me-down of Captain Marvel's style of cape:

Thank heavens the nu52 fashion designers won't get a hold of him...

Fago and Charlton understood striking while the iron was, well, lukewarm, because two years later they launched:

But you see, it was a COMPLETELY different concept. Atomic Rabbit got his powers from U-235 carrots, and protected Rabittville from the evil Sly Fox. Totally not the same thing. Not at all.

Atomic Rabbit even got a super-special endorsement...

As of issue 12 Fago left the book, and it became...Atomic Bunny!!

Why? Who knows? Probably focus groups liked Bunny better.

Under other artists, AB began to morph into something a little more...Bugsier, shall we say? Perhaps that's the real reason they changed his name...

And in 1957, the funny animal book Tom Cat changed, and with issue 9 became...

Charlton really liked radioactive funny animals, is what I'm saying.

As far as I can tell, these characters never met, or crossed over. So there's a vast untapped potential waiting here. DC? If you can set one of the nu52 on Earth 2, one can certainly be set on Earth-Charlton-Funny-Animal, right?

And I'll bet you could convince Cartoon Network to air this, and they probably wouldn't even drop it with no notice...

And don't get me started on what Charlton did with Hoppy The Marvel Bunny...