Better Comic Movies: Atom Smasher

When the atomic bomb has destroyed the world – the atomic man will be our hero! ATOM SMASHER!

I am mentally picturing this movie as a sort of a retro-futurist Doc Savage-y piece. The world got bombed to hell with atomic power – but it was the retro ideal of atomics so instead of killing things, they just got big and mutated. Society really segmented itself into tribes (as opposed to the greater societies of the Fallout setting). There was no government plan for this scenario and so we have these people going native more or less 100 years after the bombs fell (somewhere after 2000). They worship fading images of gods – the men in suites are the angels so the priests wear things similar to suits and they have this weird society that isn’t right.
A member of one of these tribes ends up getting exiled and wanders into a nuclear plant where the computer intelligence mixed with the radiation grants him powers – as opposed to a god or a magic spell and with this knowledge and power he becomes the Atom Smasher.
Through his access of the information lay lines (satellites that are still running and beaming him signals, he discovers that the hyper evolved apes who are fewer in number but are strong are planning to attack and kill the human tribe and it is up to Atom Smash to stop them. This I guess is sort of like Kamandi/OMAC vs Gorilla Grodd or the Ultra-Humanite but I think doing this with a straight and earnest face would be a cool thing to do and Atom Smasher is a character who never really “got made.” He’s originally a descendent of the Atom, he grows big and he is Jewish is not much of a characterization so I think tossing this magi-techno hero into this destroyed world would be fun.

Luke Herr

Luke is a writer and an aspiring professional comic writer who is also the editor in chief of Nerdcenaries. He currently is working on a graphic novel called Prison Spaceship.