April 1952: The Greed of the Gods

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’s thunderbolt with the faster-than-light drive of his Cometeer, the mutant superhero puts an end to the false gods by maneuvering them into a deadly meteor belt,

“It’s my life or theirs now — and I have only one weapon — my brain!” he thinks.

The story Secret of the Twelve Eternals reiterated the themes of finding rational explanations for myth and relying on your intelligence in a crisis.

The ancient astronauts/Greek gods plot idea worked so well that it was recycled at least twice in the Silver Age — for both Adam Strange (Chariot in the Sky, Mystery in Space 58, March 1960) and the Flash (The Men Who Claimed the Earth, The Flash 113, June-July 1960). The same plot would form the basis for Who Mourns for Adonais?,  a second season episode of Star Trek, which aired Sept. 22, 1967.

Captain Comet’s stories, like the slightly later Adam Strange stories, underlined the point that you should try to reason your way out of dilemmas, no matter how difficult. That should go without saying, but many things that should go without saying apparently must be said repeatedly in 21st century America.

As the Yale philosophy professor Brand Blanshard wrote, “Science … means more than a set of conclusions; it means also a set of methods and intellectual habits. The most important of these habits is adherence to a rule that is felt to be at once intellectual and moral, the rule of adjusting one’s assent to the evidence.”

That obvious principle — that reality requires you to accept the plain, verified evidence before you, not try to hide it or pervert it — was once taken for granted by all even minimally educated children in this nation. Now millions of Americans willfully ignore it, to our great shame and peril.

Because intellectual honesty is not merely admirable. It’s a necessary precondition that permits civilization to survive.

The Flash found himself in an extremely similar situation in 1960.