jungle. Chronos had more success without the Atom, but he brought himself to the attention of the Blue Beetle when he tried to blackmail one of the employees of Kord Inc. He also fought the Beetle during Darkseid's anti-hero riots. During one struggle against the Beetle, Chronos was hurled 100 million years into the past where he encountered a time-lost Captain Atom. He later met a time traveling Superman who Chronos manipulated into helping him get home. Upon his return to the present, Chronos was able to use his technology to manipulate the money markets to amass a fortune. Chronos's illegal endeavors were discovered and he was returned to prison. He was freed by the Calendar Man to work with the Time Foes, but was captured by the Teen Titans. Out of desperation and humiliation, Chronos took a drastic chance — he accepted an offer from the demon Neron and exchanged his soul for the metahuman ability to manipulate time. Those bargains with Neron are never fair and Chronos found that each journey through the timestream accelerated his aging. A man who should have been a healthy adult became an aged senior citizen. Clinton's efforts to bypass this flaw - passing his artificial age onto youths with a special glove of his own creation and intercepting other time travelers in an attempt to acquire their technology - brought him briefly into conflict with the Legion of Super-Heroes, in a somewhat confusing and often non-linear sequence of events. All the experiments and Neron's "gift" had taken a toll on Clinton's body and he began to lose touch with any sense of the "now". He had trouble staying localized in time and appeared to fade away into nothingness. His disappearance was enough for him to be declared dead and speculation has suggested that he may have slipped into "The Void" of time. A funeral of sorts was held and his research was passed on to the second Chronos (Walker Gabriel). Time travel being what it is, David Clinton's legal death has not meant the end of his presence in the DC universe; he has made several appearances since, such as during the Identity Crisis, when he claimed to have traveled forward from a point in time shortly before his final disappearance. This foreknowledge of his own (suspected) demise led to a somewhat subdued, even morose, demeanor. In The All-New Atom #12, the