February 1952: Telepathy by Television

The original science fiction novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is the explicit inspiration for Beware the Synthetic Men! in Strange Adventures 17 (Feb. 1952).

Rumors of green men in Washington, D.C., prompt a televised government spokesman to brand them a myth, but Captain Comet telepathically sees through that lie.

“No reason to fear,” broadcasts Dr. Stanton, the “nation’s science-defense chief” (didn’t know we had one).

“Great Galaxy!” says Captain Comet. “He’s saying one thing — thinking the exact opposite!”

For a mutant 100,000 years ahead of his time, Captain Comet could be remarkably naïve about politics. Or is it simply that morally and intellectually advanced beings like Adam Blake would necessarily see the ultimate futility of lying?

“What’s most interesting about this tale is the use of television,” observed comics historian Michael E. Grost. “One of Captain Comet’s seemingly endless powers is the ability to read thoughts. After all, he explains that thoughts are merely electric waves, which his advanced senses can pick up. But it turns out that thought waves are actually broadcast by TV, along with the picture and sound, so while watching at home Captain Comet can read the thoughts of a man who is broadcasting on live TV, right over the air waves! Green Lantern’s ability to look into people's minds and see the truth is one of his most important capabilities. Here, Captain Comet can do something similar.”

Note that in 1945, we had fewer than 10,000 TV sets in the United States. By 1952, that figure had risen to nearly 17 million.

“Television was so new in 1952 that it was still regarded as an sf invention,” Grost wrote. “It seemed plausible that it might have undiscovered properties or potentials, such as thought broadcasting. There are also aspects of social commentary or even satire here. The story explicitly contrasts what is being said by the broadcaster to what he is actually thinking. Even in the 1950s, people were skeptical about this.”

Comet learns the Pentagon’s goal was to be able to build “synthetic men-warriors who cannot be killed.” The prototype artificial men, named for the first five letters of the Greek alphabet, are made of “neoplasm,” which makes them immune to bullets and poison and gives them super strength.

Mary Shelley’s novel left us with two enduring themes — one about the creation of artificial life, and the other about how advancements in knowledge can have unintended and disastrous consequences.

The second comes into play here when the scaly green super-warriors decide serving human purposes isn’t such a hot idea. They tear out their prison bars and escape to the countryside, intending to create a new race of beings.

Tearing down the surrounding telegraph poles, the green men isolate and seize the small town of Calnit near the Great Salt Lake.

“Th- they walked through a hail of bullets!” exclaim the local inhabitants.

“You humans will live — as our slaves!” the green men reply.

But Captain Comet, knowing that the synthetics feed on pure calcium nitrate, had reasoned that Calnit might be one of the places where the green men would hide. With his encyclopedic brain, Comet was aware that the white oolitic sand near the Great Salt Lake is made up of concentric layers of calcium carbonate.

Flying to Utah in his rocket ship, Comet confronted the menace unleashed by what Eisenhower would term the military-industrial complex.

“Bah! He is human, is he not?” sneered one of the synthetics. “Therefore bullets will slay him! Fire…”

But although the superhero’s telekinesis slows the bullets to a harmless speed, he finds his telepathic powers do not work on the synthetics, who mob him.

Pretending to be overcome, the Man of Destiny plays for time until he can deduce the green men’s weakness. Then, conspiring with the townspeople, he traps the synthetics in a small supply room that he floods with pure oxygen.

“My clue lay in their food — calcium nitrate,” Comet explains. “Nitrates mean nitrogen and I deduced that it was the nitrogen in the air which they breathed — not the oxygen! Just as humans would perish in air of pure nitrogen, so the synthetics couldn’t survive in pure oxygen! It combined with the calcium in their bodies to form calcium carbonate — which is the formula for marble!”

Mounted on a hilltop pedestal, with a plaque, the five frozen beings end up a tourist attraction for Calnit.

The origin of this story can be traced to the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland, on the evening of June 16, 1816, when Lord Byron made a suggestion.

Why not have everybody write a ghost story?

“Everybody” would include Byron himself, physician John William Polidori, actress Claire Clairmont, poet Percy Shelley and his 18-year-old wife Mary.

“Mary Shelley, for her part, could think of nothing that night — or for several nights thereafter,” noted Peter Haining. “It seemed as if the whole idea would be a failure.

“Then, unexpectedly, as she lay in bed about a week later in the half-world between waking and sleeping, Mary experienced a vivid flight of imagination in which she saw a scientist create artificial life in a laboratory. Here was her theme, she knew at once, and the next morning took up her pen.

“The result of that dream was Frankenstein. But not the famous novel that we know today. Mary, true to the instructions of the challenge, merely wrote a short story around her nightmare which she then showed to Byron and Shelley. Her host dismissed it with hardly a glance; her husband, though, read the few pages rather more carefully, and then declared it was not really a story. She should perhaps try to turn it into a novel.”

That she did, and the result was published two years later. “What she also did that night was to give life to the creature who ever since has walked through all our days and nights and illustrations and moving pictures…”
And comic books, Haining might have added.