Thursday, August 22, 2013
Groove's Faves: "Children of Doom" by O'Neil and Boyette
Greetings, Groove-ophiles! Today we're going to take a look back at Denny O'Neil (writing as Sergius O'Shaugnessy) and Pat Boyette's Children of Doom. Charlton's publishers and editory Dick Giordano must have had a lot of faith in O'Neil and Boyette's dark futuristic fable as evidenced not only by the "A Charlton Classic" blurb on the splash page, but by the fact that they allowed our creative team to experiment with black and white art in a color comic. Today we're not phased by artistic experimentation, but in 1967 Charlton's powers-that-were took a huge risk. While sales might not have set the world on fire, Charlton Premiere #2 (cover-dated November 1967) is well-remembered and highly regarded by fans of classic comics. If you've never seen it, you're probably about to become a fan, too!
And here I thought Gene Colan was the first to do those trapezoid/parallelogram-shaped panels at Marvel on Dr. Strange, but Boyette's work precedes it! Furthermore, Stan Lee wouldn't let Berni Wrightson draw the King Kull story, "The Skull of Silence" (which you've posted here in the past, Groove), with colour panels draining into black-and-white (to signify the supernatural absence of sound), then suddenly bursting into full colour when the skull 'screams'---and here Pat Boyette has many b&w panels in this 1967 story. A bit clunky, yes, but there are several innovations in comics evidence in this work which seem to be little known or acknowledged.
ReplyDeleteChris A.
Just giving it a quick glance I was so excited about it, I made it our Group Read of the Week over at the GSBAMB.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.comicboards.com/gsmb/
I bow down to you because I've been getting 99% of our Group Reads and Back Ups of the Week from searching through your blog archives.