February 1953: The Time Capsule Trojan Horse
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.
Flying into space, the Man of
Destiny discovers that the radioactive cloud is not headed toward Earth. But because the cloud might strike other
inhabited planets, Comet destroys it by causing a chain reaction with a
miniature nuclear bomb, then turns the Cometeer back toward Earth.
Where he’s in for a shock.
In Captain Comet’s absence, Prof.
Zackro decided to accept an invitation from his colleague Dr. Ivor Northrup, who
“coincidentally” lives only a few miles from where the time capsule surfaced.
Once there, Zackro found himself
under the mental domination of rebellious cosmic-powered robots created by
Northrup. The cloud threat turns
out to have been the robots’ ruse to lure Captain Comet away from the planet while
they subjugated humanity.
One good luring deserves another,
so the Man of Destiny leads the mechanical men deep into a cavern where cosmic
rays can’t penetrate, leaving them “helpless as toy soldiers.”
Although the concept of a time
capsule began earlier in history, the phrase itself was wasn’t yet 20 years old
when this issue of Strange Adventures was
published.
The term “time capsule” was first
used in 1937 when a capsule was prepared for burial for the 1939 New York
World’s Fair.
Created by Westinghouse, the
90-inch capsule of copper, chromium and silver alloy included such items as a
doll, a spool of thread, a microscope and crop seeds. Microfilm spools offered a
Sears Roebuck catalog, a dictionary and other publications. The capsule was
meant to be opened 5,000 years later, specifically in the year 6939.
Several items in that time capsule
are already obsolete, including a wind-up toy, tooth powder, a Kodak Bantam
camera, an asbestos shingle and a slide rule.
Bruce Kanin:
ReplyDeleteI wonder why Captain Comet didn't get his own book or even a tryout in SHOWCASE or THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD. I'd have gobbled it up.
I replied:
He arrived too soon, I suppose. Thematically and literally, he was a man ahead of his time.
Johnny Williams:
ReplyDeleteCaptain Comet was ‘the perfect superhero for the boy - Johnny’.
He had super powers
He was a spaceman therefore space adventures
He had extra sensory psionic abilities
He had both a cool spaceship and a raygun
….so all-in-all this ‘Atomic Age of Comics’ superhero was ‘tailor made’ for a certain young Black boy from the South Side of Chicago.
Bob Bailey:
ReplyDeleteI so love the Captain Comet stories by John Broome and Murphy Anderson! It’s such a shame that most of them haven’t been seen since they were published in 1951-1954.
Joseph Lenius:
ReplyDeleteDan Hagen has infinitely more respect for Captain Comet than does doltish DC Comics!!!
I replied:
You bet. I decided to create a CC blog after it became clear that DC was never going to republish the material.
Paul Zuckerman:
ReplyDeleteEven though the term was not used, there are some earlier "time capsules"
I remember in 1976 the big deal about opening the Century Safe from the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition. On my first trip to the Smithsonian that year (1976, not 1876!), I saw it and took a few pictures.
Jerry Eiff:
ReplyDeleteThat would have changed, of course, if DC hadn't abandoned its hardcover reprint series years ago. The next volume announced was Captain Comet, and we would have been treated to a healthy helping of the Comet's stories. Unfortunately, it was dumped, and DC has not seen fit to publish any of the Comet stories, although I sense there would be some demand for them.
I replied:
That prompted me, in fact, to create a blog devoted to the Captain Comet stories. I figured even if DC intended to forget him, I wouldn't.