"Children of Doom" is a story I've examined before at the original Dojo,but this time I'm focusing on it as an atomic fable. The yarn of how the story was composed is interesting in itself as it was put together quickly when a scheduled story for Charlton Premiere failed to appear and that Denny O'Neil (under his Charlton pen name of "Sergius O'Shaunessy") wrote it quick and artist Pat Boyette (who typically did pencils, inks and letters for his jobs) handled the rest. It's weird and oddly compelling, even if it doesn't totally make sense all the time.
We begin at the end with a story told in flashback of how an atomic Doomsday device was made to scare mankind into peace. But a tinpot dictator used other technology to create massive firestorms which were the targets of missiles from space which caused the firestorm to overspread the entire planet. It resulted in mutations of three kinds -- firestarters, blind soothsayers, and mysterious others who stay hidden from the mass of humanity who survive but just barely.
The astronauts who fired the missiles think they can get their ship to Venus where they think they might survive and there they encountered a mutated human, one of the mysterious hidden variety who is apparently able to transport himself across space, and they bring him back to Earth.
But all that folderal activates the Doomsday device and only the weird powers of the mysterious and shunned mutants can save the day for the rest of humanity which hangs on by a thread as the story winds up. It's not a happy tale, it's not really a sad tale, it's an enigmatic fable which does and doesn't make sense at the same time.
But one thing it is for certain and that's a parable preaching against the dangers of war and particularly atomic war, as if that needed preaching against. But there we are. This story is widely reprinted but I read it this last time in The Unknown Anti-War Comics from Yoe Books.
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