January 1952: The Ghost Who Wasn’t Dead


Strange Adventures 16 (Jan. 1952) anticipates Dr. Strange with the story The Ghost of Captain Comet.
When the Midwestern town of Pineville panics after dead people begin to reappear there, the skeptical Captain Comet decides to send his own “ghost” to investigate.
This new power of creating a mental image of himself would be duplicated later in Stephen Strange’s astral projections.
Comet learns that all the “ghosts” are really an alien energy creature trapped here by an H-bomb test, and forced into the shape of various dead people by the telepathic longings of those who miss them.
The superhero is able to return the frightened being to his real form – a puff of smoke — and his home dimension.
This Captain Comet story anticipated the brilliant Quatermass and the Pit, a BBC science-fiction serial transmitted live in December 1958 and January 1959.
The third and last of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass serials began with the appearance of “ghosts” and other spooky phenomena in Hob’s Lane, a London street long said to be haunted. In fact, the effects are caused by the telepathic transmissions of a buried five-million-year-old Martian space ship that is about to be unearthed by excavations.
The protagonist, Prof. Bernard Quatermass, is a clear successor to Conan Doyle’s Prof. Edward Challenger and an ancestor of Dr. Who. Hammer Film made an excellent movie of the story in 1967 as Five Million Years to Earth.
Intellectual, analytical, ethical, humane, open-minded but dismissive of superstitious bunk and irrational twaddle, cool even in a vast crisis, the 1950s BBC hero Quatermass is the polar opposite of the assorted assassins and prostitutes that contemporary popular culture often offers as role models.
The U.S. had ended World War II by developing and detonating the most fearsome technology ever known to humanity, and American respect for science and technology was high when DC’s science fiction comics were being published in the 1950s. So rationalism ruled, despite the inherent absurdity of the subject matter.
Superstition was routinely derided, and any apparent incursion by the supernatural forces like “ghosts” was explained away by story’s end. DC Comics anticipated Scooby-Doo on that score.
Pseudoscience was fine. The improbable — and even the impossible — was no problem. But the uncanny was unacceptable.

Comments

  1. Dan HagenNovember 28, 2022 at 2:47 PM

    Nicholas Burns wrote:
    Belief in 'out of body experience' is part of many forms of philosophical and religious thought around the world --including Judeo-Christian faiths. In the late 1800s, 'astral projection' was popularized in the USA by the Theosophical Society which still exists today. Such preexisting beliefs, and the wide publicity they received, made the 'ectoplasmic self' an easily understood and accepted visual and conceptual device in comics -- one both esoterically cool, visually interesting, and useful. 🤓

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dan HagenNovember 29, 2022 at 11:36 AM

    Paul Zuckerman wrote:
    Broome almost always went with a scientific explanation. He didn't seem to go for magic as someone like Gardner Fox might. When Broome created a magician, it was through future science (Abra Kadabra). So, this story is right in tune with that. There is only one story I can think of off-hand in which he allowed for something perhaps not scientific -- the Flash story Doorway to the Unknown in which Flash is visited by a spectral vision of someone he discovers had just died. Well, perhaps one other story -- the Secret Origin of the Guardians, in which a hand is seen at the creation of the universe. Spiritual, not spirits.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Dan HagenNovember 29, 2022 at 11:38 AM



    Daniel Bonner wrote:
    Excellently informative commentary. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dan HagenNovember 29, 2022 at 11:39 AM

    Paul Hylemon wrote:
    How criminally underrated is Murphy Anderson!?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Dan HagenDecember 1, 2022 at 3:34 AM

    Andrew Macaluso wrote:
    Dan Hagen, the Captain was like the symbol of his age. Pre- Pure Silver Age Goodness and SCIENCE!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

August 1976: The Return of Captain Comet

Image
In 1976, Captain Comet took a leaf from another stalwart captain’s book, the one called America. Like that Marvel superhero, Adam Blake reappeared after having been missing for decades, apparently unaged. “He’s been across the galaxy twice aboard his Cometeer, visiting a thousand worlds with his flight belt, seeing sights no man has seen before him, or will ever see again,” wrote my old friend David Anthony Kraft, collaborating with Gerry Conway on the second issue of a fun title called The Secret Society of Super Villains (July-Aug. 1976). Pablo Marcos penciled. Out of touch in deep space for two decades, Comet couldn’t be expected to tell a superhero from a supervillain, so he waded into a skirmish against Green Lantern on the side of what he presumed to be underdogs, Grodd the Super Gorilla and the playing-card themed Hi-Jack. Actually, given his own past experience with evil super-gorillas and the fact that he’s telepathic, Captain Comet might have been a bit more suspicious. Whate...
Read more

August 1987: The Secret Origin of Captain Comet

Image
  In 1951, when he debuted in Strange Adventures 9, Captain Comet was DC Comics’ new Jet Age version of the Depression-era Superman.  But 36 years later, by the time writer Roy Thomas retold his origin story in the first Secret Origins Annual, Comet seemed fairly old hat. However, an obstacle can sometimes be flipped over into an asset.  That very distance in time provided a perspective that Thomas used to advantage, positioning the story in overarching histories both real and fictional. So in addition to references to Reds, Rosenbergs and the Korean War, we’re entertained by this mutant Man of Tomorrow’s reflections on the recent fate of the Justice Society of America. Recalling how they were hounded into hiding by a McCarthy-era congressional committee, he grimly considers what that might mean to his own nascent career as a superhero in the gray flannel 1950s. “I was thrilled to see ‘Captain Comet’ appear so soon after All-Star Comics folded,” Thomas said, recalling ...
Read more

December 1951: Captain Comet Forgets Himself

Image
In Strange Adventures 15 (Dec. 1951), the tale Captain Comet—Enemy of Earth! uses Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1913 story The Poison Belt as inspiration, with the superhero filling in for Professor Edward Challenger. While trying to protect Earth from being poisoned by the gasses of a passing comet, the Man of Destiny is caught off guard by an amnesia ray, then told by the alien leader Sandor that he’s the “rightful ruler of Earth” and must help conquer it. Why? Sandor relies on the argument Magneto would later use — that humans will fear Captain Comet’s mutant super-powers and try to destroy him. The no-longer-good Captain cuts in on all television broadcasts (how many times would super-villains pull that trick?) to deliver a General Zod-like ultimatum about taking over the planet. Network television was only four years old in 1951, so this must have been one of the first uses of that melodramatic cliché. “The government will never accept such tyranny!” exclaims one man on the ...
Read more