Captain Comment

Invisibility and flight are considered to be the top two fantasy super powers, and I’ve long been intrigued by any story that featured either. For example, the 1935 Doc Savage adventure The Spook Legion, featuring an invisible criminal gang, was the first that prompted me to part with the two quarters necessary to buy one of the Man of Bronze’s Bantam paperback reprints. The dramatic hook: how could a protagonist possibly overcome invisible enemies? In 1953, the Man of Destiny faced the same predicament. When a hydrogen bomb is stolen from a Pacific atoll during a test countdown, accredited observer Captain Comet traces the crime to invisible thieves from the planet Lamia in Devil’s Island in Space ( Strange Adventures 28, Jan. 1953). Devil’s Island, a penal colony in French Guiana, was notorious for its harsh treatment of prisoners. The island penitentiary operated from 1852 until the very year this issue of Strange Adventures was published. Turns out that the Septarch

In November, Captain Comet had encountered a female counterpart, Miss Universe. The next month saw him experiencing another superhero convention, at least as familiar as the distaff duplicate — the mirror-image enemy. The Man of Destiny faced his in The Counterfeit Captain Comet ( Strange Adventures 27, Dec. 1952). The story begins with one of writer John Broome’s intriguing everyday mysteries, the kind that lead to momentous events. Why is a newspaper ad seeking someone of Adam Blake’s exact physical measurements? As in the Sherlock Holmes adventure The Red-Headed League, the newspaper ad “search” has been staged to snare a particular target, in this case the superhero. Apparently his string of 17 victories against the forces of evil has made Captain Comet overconfident, because in this case he walks straight into what is pretty obviously a trap, without even using his mind-reading powers to find out what’s really going on. “Professor Z.D. Rin” — actually the al

The convention of the female counterpart who mirrors the male hero is a long-running one in superhero stories, and includes Pat Savage, Catwoman, Mary Marvel, Hawkgirl, Doll Girl, Fly-Girl, Batwoman, Batgirl, Power Girl, Supergirl and others. Captain Comet had two of them — first the alien mutant Radea and then, in Strange Adventures 26 (Nov. 1952), the futuristic Miss Universe. With Captain Comet off in space and a giant meteor threatening Earth, Zackro uses his new “time hook” to fetch a beautiful superwoman from 100,000 A.D., an era in which fashion apparently runs to green swimsuits. Dubbed “Miss Universe” by the newspapers, her exploits make Captain Comet seem old hat. “She acts like a true champion of humanity — and yet somehow I don’t trust her!” the Man of Destiny thinks. “Or am I giving vent to jealousy? I wonder…” It’s the same reaction the overshadowed Scarlet Speedster would have in another Broome story, The Mystery of the Elongated Man , in The Flash

What happened to Tuesday? Everyone on Earth slept through it in The Day That Vanished ( Strange Adventures 25, Oct. 1952), that’s what. The story begins with one of writer John Broome’s intriguing quotidian mysteries — a stock market tycoon discovers he’s lost a day on his calendar watch, an automatically timed back vault has somehow been left open for a day, an observatory discovers that the sun’s position proves it’s already Wednesday. When Prof. Zackro mentions the missing day to Captain Comet, he finds the superhero mysteriously unconcerned. And that’s because the only person who knows the truth is the man who secretly saved that day, Captain Comet, whose tireless futuristic form resisted the sleep-projecting weaponry of white-skinned, green-caped cyclopean invaders in search of a precious metal. Thinking back, the Man of Destiny recalls how his seismograph-like spaceship detector had led him to a U.S. Army base where everyone had been put to sleep. With the troops ob

Captain Comet battles global climate change in Doomsday on Earth ( Strange Adventures 24, Sept. 1952). With the planet shaking itself apart, as volcanoes erupt in Manhattan and whirlpools swallow boats in Lake Erie, accumulated knowledge once again proves to be the key to humanity’s salvation. In the science fiction and superhero comics edited by Julius Schwartz, knowledge-based professionals invariably save the day, whether they be physicists, archeologists, pilots, forensic scientists, museum directors, lawyers, writers or — like Captain Comet — librarians. Their breadth of learning and cool level-headedness enable them to sort things out even in the face of worldwide catastrophe. Here, Adam Blake’s perfect mutant memory recalls that these events were predicted in a book in his public library. Tracing the vanished author deep into the Earth, Captain Comet tangles with a griffin, a mythological creature that has the body, tail and legs of a lion and the head, wing

When rudely rebuffed by a library patron who is leafing through books, Adam Blake thinks, “I don’t ordinarily do this, but I’m going to use my telepathic powers to read his mind.” Blake discovers that the man is instantly memorizing every page he sees. So begins The Brain-Pirates of Planet X in Strange Adventures 23 (Aug. 1952). Tracing this mental marvel to a lonely spot in Midwest National Park, Captain Comet and Prof. Zackro find the man gathering with dozens of duplicates at a spacecraft. Secretly disabling the ship with telekinesis, Comet buys enough time to discover that, between them, these identical men have memorized all the knowledge on Earth. While the Man of Destiny tracks down the doppelgängers’ base in space, Zackro phones the Pentagon, saying, “Captain Comet wants those men held here, General — by armed force if necessary!” “If Captain Comet wants it, that’s enough for us, Professor!” the general replies. Must be nice to be Captain Co

This Captain Comet adventure influenced the Silver Age revival of one of DC’s most popular superheroes. In Guardians of the Clockwork Universe ( Strange Adventures 22, July 1952), the Man of Destiny is telepathically summoned by the wizened, golden-skinned Guardians of the Universe, an ancient, advanced race working to keep planets and suns in their proper orbits. The story is framed as a flashback. When a young patron asks Midwest City public librarian Adam Blake what keeps the planets where they are, Blake replies, “Er, gravitational force,” but thinks: “That’s only part of the answer, but he’d never believe the actual truth.” He recalls that he’d been tinkering with his “private jetship” the Cometeer in its shed behind Prof. Zackro’s lab when he received a telepathic message. “The thought-beam, steady as a radio signal, led me far out into space … where, beyond the reaches of our solar system, I saw that tiny world … shining by some unearthly, sunless light.” Called to

Mental powers again propel the plot of the Captain Comet exploit Eyes of Other Worlds ( Strange Adventures 21, June 1952). Experiments with a Zener deck — those symbolic cards of basic shapes developed in the 1930s by psychologist Karl Zener to test for extrasensory perception — show that Prof. Zackro’s Midwest University students have suddenly developed perfect clairvoyance. Noting that one of Zackro’s students guessed an entire deck correctly, Comet instantly calculates the odds against that to be 1,587,348,721 to 1. “It’s almost as if some outside power had helped her, but – wait a second!” The superhero’s “futuristic ray-detecting vision” spots beams from the sky striking the students when they answer the questions. Then he learns that two of Zackro’s students were arrested when they “wandered into government land by accident.” Adding up two and two, the Man of Destiny gets “spying from space” as an answer. The students are secretly being used by yellow-ski

From the heights of Olympus, Captain Comet turned to the depths of Atlantis to find trouble in Slaves of the Sea-Master ( Strange Adventures 20, May 1952). The narrative hook on this John Broome/Murphy Anderson story is a strong one. All over America, as if sleepwalking, people begin marching toward the Atlantic Ocean — even a prisoner serving a life sentence whom guards machine-gun to death as he blindly climbs a prison wall. The story has something of the vibe of British novelist John Wyndham’s “cozy catastrophe” science fiction novels, which begin with some fascinating, inexplicable event — a worldwide meteor shower blinding everyone who watches it, an entire village falling asleep for a day — and build from there. The first of those, The Day of the Triffids, had been published the year before. Using the Cometeer to construct a glass wall at the ocean’s edge to prevent somnambulant citizens from drowning themselves in the Atlantic, the Man of Destiny deduces they

This month’s adventure reaches back to “long, long ago,” when Zus, Merkry, Hurkles, and other Olympian rulers left Earth in a “sky vessel,” traveling in suspended animation and awakening one at a time, at half-century intervals, to search for true immortality. “Someday ... somewhere in the universe, the secret of immortality will be discovered!,” says Zus. By extending their lives indefinitely through hibernation, these proto-gods intend to acquire it. Encountering their ship in Strange Adventures 19 (April 1952), Captain Comet finds Merkry, in his winged helmet, testing an alien scientist’s claim of immortality by killing him with a “letho-ray.” Oh well. Back to the drawing board, as they say. In a space chase, Comet radios to demand that the murderous would-be deities surrender to face justice, but they only laugh at him. “He wants to put Zus on trial!,” the leader says. “Stand aside — while I destroy that young meddler with my own special brand of death.” Dodging Zus’

In DC comics, you just never know when you’re going to run into Batmen. Captain Comet did in on an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter in his exploit The World of Flying Men (Strange Adventures 18, March 1952). The story begins with a political rebellion on the asteroid Thule. In medieval and classical literature, “ultima Thule” was a metaphor for anyplace beyond the borders of the known world (you don’t see a lot of comic books making casual Latin references today, but John Broome did). “Dark Siders” are fomenting a rebellion against the princess Dorianna by accusing her of witchcraft, causing her to retreat in despair to her long-time secret hideaway. Like the boy Tarzan, Dorianna had discovered the remains of a wrecked vessel — in this case, a space ship — and used the materials there to teach herself English. “I’ve played here all alone so many times that I’ve even learned this odd language,” she says, reading a children’s book while sorting through the puzzling