Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File # 511: The Children Of The Atom

One of the nice things about having the Marvel and DC comics apps is I can catch up on stuff I missed, and I have (very slowly) been making my way through the X-Men’s Krakoa Age.  The problem there is they did have these crossovers, so I tend to stop dead to catch up on different series before reading the crossovers (in the intended order).  That got me through the “X of Swords” thing (and that one was screwy), but the next one was the “Hellfire Gala,” and I saw the issues in the storyline included something called Children of the Atom.  I didn’t recognize any of the characters in it, so I opted to check it out.

This one is, well, different.

Running all of six issues in total, Children of the Atom was sold as “the X-Men’s sidekicks,” so more young mutants?  There’s been plenty of X-titles about them, starting with the various New Mutants books.  What made this team different?

Well, to put it bluntly, they were like junior X-Men in the sense that they looked like established X-Men.  The team consisted of:

• Cyclops-Lass (Beatrice Bartholomew), a teenage girl with an optic blast
• Cherub (Gabriel Brathwaite), a boy who could fly and shoot sonic blasts from a “harp” of some sort
• Gimmick (Carmen Maria Cruz), a girl who could manipulate kinetic energy
• Marvel Boy (Benjamin Thomas), a boy with some sort of psychic push powers
• Daycrawler (Jason Thomas), Benjamin’s kid brother, a teleporter

Clearly based on Cyclops, Angel, Gambit, Phoenix, and Nightcrawler, the fivesome all went to the same New York City high school (well, maybe not Jason, who sometimes insisted his name was Nighty-Nightcrawler), they first appeared in March of 2021 in their own self-titled series, written by Vita Ayala and drawn by Bernard Chang until Paco Medina took over after a couple issues.  Yes, a six issue series had two different artists.  Now, for the record, as of this typing, I have only read two issues, and it’s mostly fine but nothing that really grabs me.  But since it is only six issues, one of which is part of the “Hellfire Gala,” I probably will end up reading all of ’em.  However, the concept is kinda neat, so here we are.

As presented, the Children of the Atom (no official superteam name from the looks of things) popped up in New York one day, fighting superhuman criminals and maybe getting lucky while doing so.  They presented themselves as mutants and were known in the press as the “Young X-Men” or something.  They were also big-time X-Men fans, geeking out over the likes of Maggot and Pixie.  They even run a mutant wiki of some kind!  Or at least “Cyclops-Lass” does.  They also do things like see Dazzler in concert!  But there’s something called “Kamala’s Law” that I know very little about, and that brings the Avengers to bring the team to the X-Men’s attention.  Or the X-Men already know and asked Storm to look for them.

If you are geeking out over Maggot, you will really geek out over Storm.

However, there was a very good reason why these kids didn’t go to Krakoa with all the other mutants, despite offers:  they aren’t actually mutants!  Well, most of them aren’t.  They’re typical teenagers who feel like outcasts and got their hands on alien tech that allowed them to simulate various mutant powers.  Gimmick actually did turn out to be a mutant at one point, leading to tension within the team, but they got over it before the end of the sixth issue from what I can find.

I can’t say that the fact the kids weren’t mutants was much of a surprise.  The X-Men hanging around Cyclops’s house in the first issue were wondering how Cerebro hadn’t picked up on them, so when the issue ended and the kids were trying and failing to walk through a Krakoan gate because they weren’t really mutants, well, I had figured that out when the Cerebro thing was brought up mid-issue.

So, where are these kids now?  Beats me.  They aren’t really mutants (except for Gimmick apparently), and they probably lost their tech somewhere or something.  It’s probably worth noting that Grant Morrison introduced the idea of the “U-Men” into his X-run, and the idea that humans would want to be mutants isn’t new.  It’s just none ever used alien tech to fight evil before.  But beyond that?  Well…there’s probably a good good story to be told with these characters, but I don’t think Marvel has told it yet.