October 1952: The Weekday That Wasn’t

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 oblivious, the superhero watched an alien craft land on the military parade grounds.

“I knew then what I found out later to be the awful, grim truth,” Comet narrates, realizing that he was “…the only human on Earth not in a trance-like sleep — The only one who stands between those invaders — and the safety of the world!”

Artist Murphy Anderson brought some evocative moodiness to the nightmarish nighttime scenes of Comet playing cat-and-mouse with the pallid, one-eyed invaders.

After capturing and telepathically hypnotizing one of the aliens, Comet uses the invader as a distraction so he can get the drop on other aliens with his ray gun and hold them at bay for interrogation.

The invaders — Cathorians — assure Comet that they only want a metal that’s plentiful on Earth, and that they’ve put humanity safely to sleep to avoid bloodshed.

“He’s lying! I can sense it!” the superhero thinks.

“I decided to put another of my futuristic talents to work — to check his story… My photographic memory absorbs written material with the ease of a high-speed camera!”

I know it’s just an expository device, but Captain Comet often comes off as rather amusingly self-absorbed in his thoughts, forever congratulating himself on his “mutant” this or his “futuristic” that,

From the Cathorians’ Expeditionary Field Order II, Comet learns that repeated exposure to the invaders’ giant somno-ray is fatal to humanity.

Horrified at the discovery, Comet is distracted and almost overwhelmed by the Cathorians, but manages to break free.

Hiding out in a darkened mess hall, Comet finds that “…a number of facts clicked together in my supernormal, analytic brain.” Realizing that the metal the aliens call “devonil” is aluminum, he uses gleaming kitchen utensils to dazzle the greedy aliens while he knocks them unconscious with their own somno-ray.

Packing them back into their ship and setting the controls for “ultra-spectrum speed,” Comet thinks grimly, “At the rate they’ll travel, they’ll crash into their own planet before they can wake up! It will be a lesson to Cathor never to molest Earth again!”

The idea of alien invaders mysteriously putting humans to sleep would be used to good effect by English author John Wyndham in his famed 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos, filmed twice as Village of the Damned.