When Valiant Comics was founded in 1989 by Jim Shooter and Steven Massarsky, it was a venture that neither of them planned. Their bid the previous year to buy Marvel was narrowly beaten out by Ronald Perelman, and so the two creators instead brought in outside talent and launched their own interconnected line of comics, featuring their own original heroes alongside those the two had grown up with themselves.
Among these heroes were Solar, Man of the Atom, the '60s precursor to Doctor Manhattan. While Valiant is still going strong today, Solar is just one of many characters missing from their heyday three decades ago.
Created in 1962 by Paul S. Newman and Matt Murphy, and originally sporting the title of doctor, the character first appeared in Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom published by Gold Key. Doctor Phillip Solar was a talented physicist tasked with helping a colleague try and prevent the reactor of the nuclear power plant he worked in from going into a meltdown. The two succeeded in preventing disaster, though Solar's colleague lost his life, and he as well suffered from absorbing incredible amounts of radiation. Somehow, Solar had survived, being imbued with the power to convert his body into nuclear energy, and crusading against those who had sabotaged his work in the first place. Unfortunately, Gold Key Comics wouldn't last, and neither would their original incarnation of the character.
Not long after Gold Key stopped publishing comics did Valiant come knocking on their door, looking to license several of the publisher's original characters. Along with Solar, Valiant also licensed the rights to Turok, Dinosaur Hunter, as well as Magnus, Robot Fighter. The Valiant Universe's Man of the Atom shared many of the same qualities as his predecessor, but Jim Shooter wanted to push the series in directions not taken by Gold Key. Still starting out as a physicist, this time by the name of Phil Seleski, and still working alongside his colleagues on a type of reactor that would malfunction, this version of Solar could not only become energy, but could manipulate it as well as matter on an atomic scale.
Valiant's Solar would initially try and use his powers for good by eradicating the world's supply of nuclear weapons, only to be met with interference at the hands of the United States government. This would cause Solar to lose control of his powers, thrusting the entire world into a massive singularity and splitting the character into two, one with all of his memories and no powers, and the other believing himself to be the original, Gold Key version of the hero, who Seleski had been a fan of as a child. Having also ended up back in time, before the accident that created him, Seleski set out preventing it, only to be met with resistance from his alter ego. The two would eventually come to terms with the circumstances and work together to fuse with the past version of themselves and prevent the original accident. This action only came with further shocking revelations, including that this had all been happening inside a pocket universe, not the past as Seleski had believed.
Solar's career didn't end there and it also wasn't the last time the character would be reimagined by another company. In 2004, Acclaim Entertainment, who had purchased Valiant's parent company a decade prior, declared bankruptcy, and the rights to all of the Gold Key characters were reverted to Classic Media, who at that point owned the rights to Gold Key's properties.
Dark Horse was the first to jump on the rights to the original Gold Key comics, reprinting the very first Solar series in its entirety before running its own eight-issue take on the character, written by Jim Shooter himself. Currently, Dynamite Entertainment owns the rights to the character, as well as Magnus, Turok, and Doctor Spektor, another of Gold Key's classic heroes. While its Solar: Man of the Atom series only lasted 12 issues between 2014 and 2015, it remains one of the most recent revisitations of this one-time Valiant icon.