May 1953: The Father of Grodd

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 clairvoyantly knows whom the message is from before opening it.

Given his psychic super powers, you sort of wonder why he needed to open it at all.

In any case, in The Challenge of Man-Ape the Mighty!, the Cometeer is soon speeding toward Africa, where Comet’s friend Prof. Sarcon had been running down reports of a super-evolved tribe of gorillas.

Yes, this writer, John Broome, would recycle both concepts as the hidden African Gorilla City and the Flash’s archenemy Grodd.

Finding Sarcon paralyzed by Man-Ape’s telepathic hypnosis, Comet is kayoed. He awakens to find that Man-Ape had forced Sarcon to exchange his simian form for Captain Comet’s mutant super-body, and then promptly shot Sacron dead.

Trapped in the body of an ape, unable to speak, Comet makes his way back to the U.S. as a stowaway and, rather unconvincingly, tricks Man-Ape into switching bodies again.

Ironically, while the Silver Age Flash was anticipated in this issue, the Golden Age Flash was already being ignored, even though he’d bowed out only two years before in All-Star Comics 57 (Feb.-March 1951).

In the Sid Gerson/Howard Sherman story The Human Bullet, we find a darker version of Jay Garrick’s origin. When biochemist Dr. Saunders concocts a super-scientific drug that will increase human speed a thousand times, unscrupulous college athlete John Stoll arranges to secure it for himself.

Stoll wins football games, prize fights and even horse races, killing a gambling czar who tries to rob him by catching and hurling his own bullet back at him.

Running low on wonder pills, Stoll snatches a fresh supply from Dr. Saunders’ desk, but the biochemist outwits him by planting bicarbonate tablets there instead.

 While running on water like the Flash, Stoll sinks when the drug wears off. And because he can’t swim, that disposes of the problem.

Another “strange” adventure about a super-speedster who came to a bad end would appear six years later in Strange Tales 67, in the Jack Kirby story I Was the Invisible Man!