March 1953: The Gaslighters from Outer Space


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 elegant, streamlined art and the science fictional themes were among ingredients that would converge to spark the Silver Age of Comics five years later, in Showcase 4 (Sept.-Oct. 1956). And Captain Comet would test-drive a number of innovative approaches and cover ideas that would reappear in the Flash, Green Lantern, Adam Strange, and Justice League of America features.
Leaving the library, Captain Comet is astounded to see fairy-tale monsters like giants and fire-breathing dragons attacking the city and then vanishing. And that was no coincidence. The “little boy” had been an alien in disguise.
Seemingly doubting his own sanity, Comet retreats trembling to the safety of a tree — until the alien invaders reveal themselves. Then Comet, who’d deduced he was being gaslighted, springs his trap.
On TV’s The Adventures of Superman, also in 1953, the Man of Steel would be gaslighted in the Jackson Gillis episode The Face and the Voice. And Mysterio would gaslight Spidey in The Amazing Spider-Man 24 (May 1965).
The term “gaslighting” sprang from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light, in which a scheming husband tries to convince his wife she’s going insane.
Captain Comet’s problem would be precisely the reverse in the next issue, by the way. Instead of seeing menaces that don’t exist, the superhero would be the only person to recognize the actual threat that the nation is calmly watching on the newly popular medium of television.

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