The Atomic Bomb Ring

I’ve written in this space before about how I picked up a long run of the New York Daily News Sunday comics sections at the Akron ComicCon. Half the fun of reading those old Sunday pages was seeing the ads that ran in those sections. This ad in particular caught my attention. I thought about kids back then holding the Atomic Bomb Rings up to their eyes to “squint into the secret lens to see real atoms spit to smithereens!”, but  I figured that they actually wouldn’t put radium into the rings… and they didn’t. They used polonium! The same stuff that was once used to assassinate a former Soviet spy.

Well, that was just too good to ignore, so I turned it into a story that runs this month in Funky as the gang at Atomik Komix finds that their new promotional give-away has some radioactive strings attached.