In 1967, editor Dick Giordano was shaking things up at the Charlton Comics Group. Charlton was a cheapjack company that paid writers and artists at rates ranging from poor to involuntary servitude, then printed their wares on presses that Gutenberg had discarded as outmoded. As was occasionally the case in comics' early days, you could treat the talent and its work like dirt and still occasionally get decent-to-good work out of them, plus the intermittent masterpiece. Giordano upped rates a fraction and treated people well in non-monetary ways, and so managed to increase the frequency of gems. One which happened almost as an accident was the one-shot story, "Children of Doom," which appeared in Charlton Premiere #2. It was slapped together in record time by Giordano, writer Denny O'Neil and artist Pat Boyette to fill a void created when another planned second issue fell through. O'Neil was a relatively new author to comics and he came up with a haunting tale set in the days following a nuclear holocaust. Pat Boyette was also rather new to comics and he illustrated it with a striking approach with heavy reliance on black-and-white scenes in what otherwise was a color comic. Pat had actually wanted to do the whole story without color but Charlton execs chickened out and the comic wound up being partially colored. You can make a strong argument that this made it even more arresting and eerie.
I bring this up now because my chum Scott Shaw! covers the book today over in his Oddball Comics column. He gives a much better summary there than I do here, and I suggest you go see what he has to say. "Children of Doom" came and went with very little notice. It didn't warrant a sequel, didn't impact comics of the day…didn't even get noticed by a lot of comic book fans. But those of us who did notice it will never forget it, so it's nice that Scott is again calling it to our attention.