Captain Comment

One of my favorite Captain Comet stories is The Cosmic Chessboard , both because of a sly wink writer John Broome built into the tale and because the concept was echoed in a couple of Silver Age classics. As a writer, I like to retain, recycle and recast material I’ve written when it might be useful again, and DC Comics also long practiced this form of intellectual thrift. For example, compare the Murphy Anderson covers of Strange Adventures 35 ( The Cosmic Chessboard, Aug. 1953) and Justice League of America 1 ( The World of No Return, Oct-Nov. 1960). In both cases, heroes are playing a cosmic chess match that imperils real people, and both stories even feature a dinosaur fin-headed alien who sports a third eye, (one is green-skinned, the other red-skinned). That’s one easy “tell” for recognizing the hand of particular comic book artists, of course. They all tend to have distinctive types of fantasy aliens that they draw. For DC, publishing in an era in which

Frank R. Stockton’s much-anthologized 1882 short story The Lady, or the Tiger? gets a science-fiction update in The Lady or the Tiger-Man ( Strange Adventures  34, July 1953). Captain Comet discovers a planet that seems to be telepathically subjugated by the mind dictator Esklon, who has the white-suited bald fanatic look of Superman’s early foe the Ultra-Humanite—a look designed, in this case, to deceive the reader. Because when Esklon forces Comet to choose between doors which contain a beautiful girl and a powerful, caped Tiger-Man, Esklon uses the distraction of the super-hero’s ensuing struggle with the beastman as an opportunity to kill the Tiger-Man, who was the planet’s true mind dictator. The story ends with a surprise: Rana, Esklon’s sister and the girl behind the door, stows away on the Cometeer and flies to Earth with Captain Comet “…to learn things that might help my people.” In the last panel, Adam Blake introduces her to Zackro as his new library assi

Two H.G. Wells stories helped inspire Strange Adventures 33 (June 1953). In The Human Beehive , Adam Blake travels to an irradiated South Pacific island to find tiny mammals and gigantic insects, including a super-intelligent colony of bees that has apparently enslaved the tiny human islanders. “Captain Comet is always going on journeys to other places: often planets, here an island,” observed comics historian Michael E. Grost.   “(Writer John) Broome often liked his heroes to travel. We also learn here that Captain Comet is resistant to all forms of radiation, just like Broome's Atomic Knights to come. This story is crammed with small details and little plot ideas of all kinds. Although the Captain Comet tales are short, usually six pages, Broome tried to get as much story into them as possible.” The discovery of a monstrous minnow near a nuclear test site sends Captain Comet to the South Pacific. In fact, the U.S. had detonated its first hydrogen bomb at Eniwet

DC Co­­­mics’ Strange Adventures might be called the predawn of the Silver Age. For example, in several ways, Strange Adventures 32 (May 1953) prefigures the revamped revival of the Flash three years later. And Captain Comet, the title’s lead feature, is clearly a forerunner for the streamlined jet-age superheroes to come. At the end of his previous adventure, librarian Lily Torrence, seeing Captain C­­­­­­omet for the first time on television, had remarked to Adam Blake that they look awfully similar. Blake tries to cover up in that feeble Clark Kent manner — “Oh, it’s, er, just your imagination, Miss Torrence!” But he needn’t have bothered, since by the next issue he has apparently forgotten he has a secret identity. In Strange Adventures 32, Murphy Anderson’s art shows us Captain Comet at the front door of Blake’s house, receiving a telegram sent to him by a scientist in Africa. The Western Union deliveryman is impressed that Comet clairvoyant

Instead of seeing nonexistent menaces that no one else can see, as he had in his last adventure, Captain Comet becomes the first person to recognize the actual threat that the nation is calmly watching on the newly popular medium of television. Already legendary in 1953, Orson Welles’ newscast-style radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel War of the Worlds had sparked a national panic on Halloween in 1938. In Lights, Camera — Invasion! ( Strange Adventures 31, April 1953), a live teleplay of War of the Worlds is used as a cover for an actual alien invasion. “All over the nation people waited expectantly for Captain Comet’s first television appearance — in a coast-to-coast telecast of an interplanetary drama!” the story’s cover page announced. Live TV drama was common during the “Golden Age of Television” from 1947 to 1957. In fact, on Sept. 9, 1957, CBS’s Studio One aired The Night America Trembled , a top-rated television recreation of Orson Welles' rad

The shape-shifting aliens Obla-Gan and Ik-Kandor figure that if you can’t defeat a superhero by direct confrontation, maybe you can turn him against himself. Menace from the World of Make-Believe ( Strange Adventures 30, March 1953) begins with Captain Comet in his humdrum secret identity of librarian Adam Blake, when a boy asks to be read a fairy tale about giants. Blake’s occupation as a library information clerk reflected the reverence for knowledge that would be seen throughout DC’s Julius Schwartz-edited titles, with their scientist-heroes and Space Museums. Schwartz’s Silver Age super-heroes would include a police scientist, an archeologist, a test pilot, a physics professor and a museum director — all knowledge-based professionals. Ironically, whether they realized it or not, fans were seeing the future of super-hero comics here. Captain Comet was a protagonist poised precisely between the Golden and Silver Ages, but always looking ahead. The increasingly el

Captain Comet again prefigures Magnus, Robot Fighter in The Time Capsule from 1,000,000 B.C. ( Strange Adventures 29, Feb. 1953). An archeological dig in the American West has the seemingly rare good fortune of having an artifact come right to it when a stone-age time capsule drills its way to the surface. “I am Camron, chief scientist of this land one million years ago!” says a filmed warning included in the capsule. “By a telepathic radar device, my language is being translated into your own even as I speak!” The world learns that an ancient civilization was wiped out by a radioactive cloud due to return a million years later, i.e. in 1953. Newspapers carry the story of the threat to humanity with the hope that Captain Comet can stop it. “Zackro, this super-sensitive radiation counter I put together indicates a giant radioactive cloud approaching the solar system right now!” the superhero tells his friend. “I’ve got to stop that deadly cloud — somehow!” Fly