July 1951: Visions of Future Past

Strange Adventures 10 finished Captain Comet's two-part origin and launched him on his first adventure.

Captain Comet blazed the trail in a feature that looked much more like 1960 than 1940. The sleek elegance of Carmine Infantino’s art was emergent. It would be contemporary, clean-lined and sunlit, as optimistic and reassuring as the stories by John Broome.

Infantino made the impossible seem pleasantly plausible, somehow putting the future within easy reach.

“The mature Infantino drew everything — a hidden city of scientific gorillas, a harlequin committing crimes with toys, Flash strapped to a giant boomerang — as if he believed absolutely in its existence,” observed Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs in their excellent book The Comic Book Heroes. “But Infantino’s art could so fully evoke the quiet of a small-town afternoon or the cool of a shaded lawn that readers could forgive even plots full of beatniks, schoolteachers and singing idols.”

The equally capable and sunny Murphy Anderson would illustrate most of Captain Comet’s adventures in his own refined and deceptively plausible style, beginning in Strange Adventures 12.

Captain Comet was the hero from a vision of the future now past, a spaceman-superman who designed his own extraterrestrial vehicle, the Cometeer.

“His super-hero suit was apparently intended to set the tone for the new, modern, ’50s-style characters,” comics historian Don Markstein noted. “Instead of the skin-tights of the 1940s super-guys, he wore a slimmed-down, fancied-up version of an astronaut’s pressure suit — which, while it hadn’t yet come into use in real life, was already a familiar sight in sci-fi movies of the time.”

The hero premiered as a cover feature in a science-fiction anthology title (Strange Adventures 9, June 1951). The tragic note that is played up explicitly in Superman’s origin has been muted in Comet’s, but is still there if you look closely enough.

Like Clark Kent, Adam Blake was raised by kindly Midwestern parents after being displaced — not by light years, but by millennia.

The boy’s mother didn’t aspire to greatness for him, but wanted him “…to be just like everyone else.” Her hopes were dashed when, at age 4, her son’s clairvoyance located her lost ring — the same trick young Clark Kent performed with his X-ray vision in the 1948 Columbia Superman serial after his foster mother lost her wristwatch in a haystack.

Blake could recite the entire contents of books with his photographic memory and instantly play Mozart on the clarinet. Running touchdowns came easily to a boy who could read the minds of opposing players.

What wasn’t easy for Blake was enduring the loneliness of the eternal outsider.

“I’m not like everyone else,” he thought, brooding one day in college. “I – I try to be, but I’m not! And people sense it — and avoid me!”

Blake discovered that he was more different than even he knew when a classmate fell while rock climbing, and he caught her in midair with mental force.

Consulting physics professor Emery Zackro, Blake learns his true nature as a kind of anti-throwback, “…an accidental specimen of future man.”

Confronted by the wonders of Blake’s “futuristic abilities,” Zackro is given to exclaiming “Great Caesar’s Ghost,” just as if he were the editor of a great metropolitan newspaper.

Even the hero’s name is subtly evocative — Adam, the new man, and Blake, the famous visionary.

His birth is marked by the arrival of a comet, just like that of another American hero with a dual identity, Mark Twain.

Blake’s occupation as a library information clerk reflected the reverence for knowledge that would be seen throughout the Julius Schwartz-edited titles at DC, with their scientist-heroes and Space Museums. Schwartz’s Silver Age super-heroes would include a police scientist, an archeologist, a test pilot, a physics professor and a museum director — all knowledge-based professionals.

Ironically, whether they realized it or not, fans were seeing into the future of super-hero comics here. Captain Comet was a hero poised precisely between the Golden and Silver Ages, but always looking ahead.

The increasingly elegant, streamlined art and the science fictional themes were among the ingredients that would converge to spark the Silver Age of Comics five years later, in Showcase 4 (Sept.-Oct. 1956). And Captain Comet would test-pilot a number of innovative approaches and cover ideas that would reappear in the Flash, Green Lantern, Adam Strange and Justice League of America features.

For example, even in his two-issue origin and first adventure, Comet faced the menace of gigantic, radiation-emitting tops that were stealing Earth’s atmosphere. The use of children’s preoccupations like toy tops as centerpieces would become another familiar Silver Age plot device, particularly for The Flash’s archenemy the Top.

Seeing radio-magnetic waves emanating from the moon with his “futuristic eyes,” Comet traces the attack to a gigantic, thousand-year-old spaceship there, full of tall, light blue aliens sealed in those transparent tubes that would hold so many captured super-heroes during the Silver Age.

The Air Bandits from Space turns out to be a surprisingly poignant story, as Comet learns from the alien leader Harun that his race, the Astur, are fleeing a dying planet and require an airless world to survive. But Harun, discovering that his fellow aliens in the tubes are in fact dead, hurls himself from an airlock in despair, and his now-empty spaceship moves on automatically.

“What irony!” Captain Comet thinks. “A ship full of dead creatures — searching through the universe for an ideal world for them to live on!”