December 1952: Double, Toil and Trouble

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 alien agent Zdrin — tells Blake that his resemblance to Captain Comet will enable a new invention to give Blake Captain Comet’s powers. The superhero plays along, but nothing seems to happen when he’s placed in the “professor’s” experimental cabinet.

In fact, Captain Comet has been duplicated without his knowledge, and with “the principle of evil” added to his makeup.

Lured to the Cometeer by his twin, the superhero finds himself hurtling toward the “Planet of Death.”

Testing his counterpart with a mental thunderbolt, Comet finds “…His power is equal to mine! I can’t touch him!”

“My master was right!” the duplicate thinks. “Neither of us can hurt each other — directly!”

Ejected from the Cometeer onto the fatal planet, Comet manages to drag the duplicate out with him. The two struggle, and one dies, irradiated.

We aren’t kept in suspense about which one it is long, because Captain Comet interrupts Zdrin planning an onslaught on Earth. And the reason for his survival is, of course, ironic.

“This odd metal wrist band — which you put on me so that you could tell me from the duplicate — protected me from the fatal rays!” Comet tells him. “It was a natural insulation against the menace!”

“(Gulp!) The one possibility I didn’t foresee!” Zdrin stammers.

Prof. Zackro, who had been treated rudely by Comet’s duplicate, thinks, “I should have known that Captain Comet will never change! That he will always be brave, kind and fearless….”

“Please, Zackro,” says the modest super-hero. “Remember — I can read your thoughts!”

Captain Comet might have saved himself a lot of trouble if he’d remembered that earlier.

The theme of doubling has always been especially prevalent in superhero comics. The double is built right into the concept of many superheroes in the form of the secret identity or “alter ego.” Superman and Clark Kent, Batman and Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker and Spider-Man, always the two who were one.

And then there are the archenemies, who always turn out to be, in one way or another, funhouse mirror dark doubles of the hero.

Sidekicks too mirror the heroes, who also face all those robot doubles, mirror creatures, clones and various literal duplicates. An evil duplicate of the Caped Crusader, Killer Moth, had debuted shortly before this issue of Strange Adventures in Batman 63 (Feb.-March 1951). A more famous “imperfect duplicate” of a superhero, Bizarro, would appear in 1958 in both the Superman daily newspaper strip and the Superboy comic book.

So what’s with all the doubles?

Critic Mark Schorer noted that the Gothic tradition, or what Nathaniel Hawthorne would have called the romance tradition, refers to “...stories that are set in a world where we continually move without transition or warning from the actual into the dream, from the real into the surreal, from the natural into the supernatural.”

That’s a description that neatly fits the comic book superhero stories, which shift constantly from mundane and recognizable urban reality to nightmarish mythological battle zones and back again.

“They are stories whose central concern is with the theme of the doppelgänger, the alter ego, and the supernatural is, in fact, symbolic of the world in which that other self — which we cannot ever confront in the busy social world — exists.”

Deepak and Gotham Chopra, in their book The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes, note that the doubling theme can explore the Jungian Shadow or dark side of the personality.

So it’s all a metaphor, unconscious but existentially valid. As we journey though life, those of us who are paying attention can’t help but notice that the greatest constraints we battle are invariably those we place on ourselves.