It discusses the relationship between Jim Davis, a black man, and Julia, a wealthy white woman, after a comet strike unleashes toxic gases that kill everyone in New York except them.
[3][4] “The messenger," a man named Jim, descends into the lower vaults of the bank where he works to complete a task for the president.
Jim silently considers his frustration with the task while the conversation of his superiors revolves around discussion of "the comet” which is to pass near the Earth soon.
They seem on the verge of overcoming their racial barriers in an act of procreation for the survival of the human race, when suddenly a group of men arrive, revealing that only New York was affected by the comet.
Julia comes to think of herself as the "mighty mother of all men to come and Bride of Life" and of Jim as "her Brother Humanity incarnate, Son of God and great 'All-Father' [i.e., the founder or progenitor] of the race to be".
[9] As Womack argues, Du Bois writes as an Afrofuturist to re-imagine the past and future of African Americans in order to revise the historical and diasporic narrative.
Through the course of this re-imagined origin story, Du Bois moves Jim, who was relegated to the task of going deep underground to retrieve records from the bank vault, to become the vital source of human life.
In an episode of the American television series Riverdale, titled "Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Seven: Goodbye, Riverdale", characters Jughead Jones, Veronica Lodge and Clay Walker discuss their admiration for Du Bois's "The Comet" and their desire to adapt the short story into a major motion picture, ideally starring Sidney Poitier.