November 1951: The Day the Comet Still Stood


In Strange Adventures 14 (Nov. 1951), in an apparent nod to the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, a gigantic spaceship hovering over Washington, D.C. (no longer called Capitol City), announces through skywriting that it intends to collect a specimen of humanity.
This issue was on the newsstands during the famous film's run.
The groundbreaking Robert Wise film, which starred Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal, also featured a large alien spacecraft appearing over Washington, D.C., and a menacing robot.
The movie premiered Sept. 28, 1951, and this issue of Strange Adventures was available on the newsstands immediately afterward, in October, during the run of the picture. So the story similarities may have been a coincidence, or — more likely — writer John Broome and editor Julius Schwartz may have prepared theirs to coincide with the film’s release.
For inspiration, they could have referred to Harry Bates’ short story Farewell to the Master, which had appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in 1940 and was adapted as the basis of the 20th Century Fox film.
Destination Doom! features robots who are “the former slaves of an ancient human race” and who’ve decided to turn the tables. That’s the premise from which Gold Key’s Magnus Robot Fighter would spring in the Silver Age (not to mention the Terminator movies).
Magnus Robot Fighter appeared in 1963.
A somewhat cowardly government forbids Captain Comet to resist the aliens, proclaiming that one average man will be sacrificed to save the Earth. The hero determines that that “average” guy must be Adam Blake, and uses his telekinetic powers to force that result on a lottery of volunteers.
“These tactics may not be entirely ethical — but I can’t risk not being chosen!” Captain Comet muses, with Lone Ranger-like attention to normative nuance.
In this adventure, Comet’s abilities are expanded to include the power of generating a personal force field.
The story is one of the early iterations of what would quickly become a cliché in superhero science fiction stories — the alien invaders who mistake a superman for an ordinary human being, and abort their invasion plans in fright.
The Mighty Thor, Iron Man, the Phantom, the Jaguar and many others would run into precisely the same situation, but the good captain got there ahead of them all.
DC Comics on the newsstands in October 1951.


Comments

  1. Dan HagenAugust 24, 2019 at 5:22 AM

    Roy Thomas said, “No idea how closely attuned Julie was to sf films, but the connection seem unlikely. I must’ve seen the film soon after the opening date, in Cape Girardeau, MO, when I was pushing 11. It took some courage for me to go, alone, esp. after having the wits scared out of me earlier by ‘The Thing.’
    “I’ll always be happy that at least I got to speak to Harry Bates once on the phone (he was living around 14th Street in Manhattan at the time) and to get him a little extra money for adapting his story in WORLDS UNKNOWN, though I never heard what he thought of it... or if he even technically had the right, as he said, to sell us the adaptation rights.”

    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