Captain Comment

Superheroes are supposed to appear just in time. But like his contemporary Captain Comet, Marvel Boy arrived either too late or too soon. These two Marvel and DC superheroes were transitional characters that represented a shift from World War II to the space age. Appropriately enough for futuristic figures, both were at least a decade ahead of time. Superheroes were distinctly out of fashion in the early 1950s, and wouldn’t be popular again until the very end of the decade. But it’s no coincidence that two of the first postwar superheroes shared the power of super-intelligence — were in fact so intelligent that they were telepathic.  The product of human intelligence had, after all, ended World War II with two nuclear detonations in 1945, making it blindingly clear to the world that intelligence was power. Like Captain Comet, Marvel Boy also had a space ship in which to zoom around. Both characters were aimed at the zeitgeist of the era, combining the superheroes that had become popula