June 1951: Comet at Dawn

The conformist Cold War decade of the 1950s had dawned, and the detectives had vanished.

They had been the colorful, uncanny ones, the ones who had cheered children from the end of the Depression through the turmoil of World War II into this uneasy peace, this era in which even comic books themselves would become suspect.

In All-Star Comics 57 (Feb.-March 1951), the Justice Society of America ended its 11-year run by solving The Mystery of the Vanishing Detectives.

The title was writer John Broome’s sly hint to readers of what was to come, but astute fans may already have seen the handwriting in the margins. The Flash had lost his feature in 1949. Green Lantern did too, having already suffered the humiliation of being elbowed aside by a dog — a “wonder dog,” granted, but still.

Captain America had taken a back seat to horror, his comic renamed Captain America’s Weird Tales before the hero vanished in 1950. The Human Torch packed it in on a nostalgic note, retelling his origin in Marvel Mystery Comics 92 (June 1949), and Namor bowed out the same way the same month in Sub-Mariner Comics 32.

Even the popular Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, and Doll Man would disappear by mid-decade. Super-heroes must have seemed to be a dying fad in comics, replaced by mundane genres like crime, romance and horror in the more conventional, gray-flannel postwar world.

Of course, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman would endure, the former having established himself outside comics in newspaper comic strips, movie serials, radio, and then television.

With its intriguing closing-credits reference to those “magazines” in which Superman appeared, The Adventures of Superman TV show led me to comic books in the late 1950s.

I fell in love, instantly and forever.

I would be particularly tantalized by what had come and gone before, the vanished heroes. How could people who had once regularly saved the world ever have been defeated?

Years later, I learned that DC had made an early effort to revive the dying genre with a fresh, modernized character. Captain Comet must have appeared to fans like an oasis in the superhero desert of 1951.

One 10-year-old fan certainly thought so. “I was thrilled to see ‘Captain Comet’ appear so soon after All-Star Comics folded,’ Roy Thomas said.  “It made me think, at least for a little while, that perhaps super-heroes would make a comeback... something that, as it happened, I was about to give up on by the mid-1950s, with the failure of that feature and all the other heroes briefly revived or created to try to glom onto some of the success caused by the ‘Superman’ TV show. 

“But no, it couldn’t really make up for the loss of the JSA, with six great heroes snuffed out of existence in one fell swoop.  I did, however, try to adjust... and at one stage in the early-to-mid-‘50s I made up my own version of a revival of the JSA, which included Green Arrow, Johnny Quick, Aquaman, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman... and Captain Comet.  I don’t think I ever wrote out any stories for the group, but I did play around with it.”

Had his feature not ended in 1954, Captain Comet would undoubtedly have been one of the founding members of the Justice League of America. Even absent, he exerted a strong influence on those super-heroes who were.

In the hands of editor Julius Schwartz, writer John Broome, and artist Carmine Infantino, Captain Comet was what Superman might have been, had DC’s flagship character been created 20 years later. And with most of the original comic book super-heroes gone, Captain Comet signaled the shape of things to come.

A true Man of Tomorrow evolved 100,000 years beyond his time, Captain Comet was a Superman updated from the Depression to the postwar flying saucer era. Like the Man of Steel, the Man of Destiny operated under the cover of a mild-mannered secret identity, possessing superhuman strength and damage-resistant skin.

But while science fiction was the excuse for Superman, it was the raison d’etre for Captain Comet.

Recall that 1951 saw the premiere of popular, critically acclaimed Hollywood films like Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still and Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World. Science fiction was in the air, alongside all those “flying saucers” Americans had started seeing in 1947. So it made sense that a new Superman would rely largely on SF-based abilities with impressive pseudoscientific names like telepathy and telekinesis.

And by 1951, scientific advancement had assumed an undeniable urgency. Despite retconned claims that the Sub-Mariner was “the first mutant super-hero,” the actual first such character explicitly described as such was Captain Comet, a mutant who appeared just as fears of radioactive fallout were becoming widespread. Radiation was a known mutagen, so mutation was a Cold War concern.

Two years before Captain Comet appeared, a long-range U.S. reconnaissance plane had detected high levels of radiation in the stratosphere, a signal that America’s four-year exclusive ownership of nuclear weapons was over. The Russians had detonated an atomic bomb.

The U.S. response would be the development of a “super bomb,” later to be called the hydrogen bomb. A thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, it would be tested on Nov. 1, 1952, when Captain Comet was less than two years into his run.

On the playground of the world’s subconscious, the fear of radioactive war prompted giant menace films like the 1954 SF movies Them! and Godzilla and Cold War spy films like I Married a Communist (1949), Big Jim McLain (1952) and even Savage Mutiny (1953), with Johnny Weissmuller as the comic strip hero Jungle Jim, trying to evacuate an African island that’s being used as an nuclear test site.

As Americans debated the wisdom of building fallout shelters and human civilization came to the brink of destruction in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, nukes stayed on Americans’ minds, and became Marvel Comics editor Stan Lee’s go-to literary device for explaining super powers.

Lee had even planned to call a 1963 comic book series The Mutants, but his publisher vetoed the use of that term, claiming it was unfamiliar to children. So Lee changed the name to The Uncanny X-Men, and the term “mutant” became as familiar to comic book readers as apple pie and hula hoops.

But in fact the first mutant superhero, Captain Comet, had already arrived Earth a dozen years before.

All the DC Comics titles on the newsstand in May 1951, with the exception of Wonder Woman.