Captain Comment

The sight of children at play startles stalwart Captain Comet in Strange Adventures 42 (March 1954). Why? The cover scene, repeated in the story, shows the Man of Destiny watching a costumed boy and girl playing at a Captain Comet adventure, and reminds me of a similarly charming scene in Fantastic Four 11 (Feb. 1963). Four children imitating the FF go from boisterous to awestruck when they’re treated to a good-natured demonstration of the real team’s super-powers. The Planet of Ancient Children is Comet’s inadvertent destination in Strange Adventures 42. The children playing remind him of the planet Glete, which is run by telepathically powered youngsters who age in reverse. “You must think I acted pretty strange back there with the kids,” Comet tells Prof. Zackro. “But you’ll understand when you’ve heard what I’m about to tell you…” During his first attempt at intergalactic flight in the Cometeer, the superhero’s ship was seized by a mysterious force and direc...

In Strange Adventures 41 (Feb. 1954), Captain Comet Dr. Whos his way from the Cretaceous to 50,000 A.D. in The Beast from Out of Time . The story begins when library information clerk Adam Blake gets a question he could easily answer, but doesn’t dare: where can Captain Comet be found? Linda Bartlett’s father, the nuclear physicist Jeris Bartlett, has mysteriously disappeared, and she doesn’t think the police will believe her bizarre story — but Captain Comet might. A meeting is quickly arranged, and Linda tells the mutant superhero that for years, her job was to sit beside her father as he slept and write down what he might say. She was a kind of hypnagogic stenographer. “Let me see what I was sleep-talking about last might,” Dr. Bartlett says one morning. “Hmm. Time travel! Isn’t it strange, Linda — that my unconscious mind should be so much more active than my conscious one” Working without food or rest, Dr. Bartlett completed his time machine, turned a dial to test i...

In Strange Adventures 40 (Jan. 1954), Captain Comet confronts yet another a beautiful mental marvel, this one a thief whose energy beams can paralyze bonded messengers. I say “yet another” because this menace, The Mind Monster, was the third psi-powered superwoman the Man of Destiny had run into since his debut in 1951. First came the 18-year-old mutant Radea, The Girl from the Diamond Planet, in Strange Adventures 12 (Sept. 1951). She was followed in Strange Adventures 26 (Nov. 1952) by Miss Universe, who turned out to a super-evolved plant being from a world that would someday occupy Earth’s position in space. That would probably have disqualified her from the first Miss Universe Pageant, actually held in Long Beach, California, earlier that same year. When the police backtrack The Mind Monster to Prof. Zackro’s lab, Comet discovers that she is in fact a spider who has been hyper-evolved by exposure to the concentrated radiation from a supernova the professor had been ob...

Captain Comet’s version of Grodd, the “diabolically intelligent” Man-Ape, returns as a criminal defendant in The Guilty Gorilla ( Strange Adventures 39, Dec. 1953). By telepathically controlling a judge and manhandling police officers like rag dolls, the simian is able to escape and recruit a criminal gang to help him. This super-gorilla, Comet’s only recurring archenemy, foreshadows the string of early appearances by Grodd in the Silver Age Flash title. DC’s over-reliance on gorilla covers would become an affectionately mocked cliché in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The trend started in Strange Adventures . “The eighth issue of Strange Adventures achieved some sort of cult status,” noted Greg Hyland. “The cover showed a gorilla in a zoo holding up a slate that read, ‘Please believe me! I am the victim of a terrible scientific experiment!’ This Incredible Story of an Ape with a Human Brain had strong sales, and [DC editor, Julius] Schwartz recalls that (publisher) ‘Irwin...

A classic science fiction story, The Day of the Triffids , gets a wink in Strange Adventures 38 (Nov. 1953). In John Wyndham’s 1951 novel, a freak meteor shower blinds most people on Earth, unleashing a plant menace and leading to the enslavement of the few remaining sighted people. DC’s science fiction stories often had a vibe similar to the “cozy catastrophe” novels for which Wyndham became famous. Whether the author was John Wyndham or John Broome, inexplicable and weird events would suddenly intrude on everyday reality, presaging some literally earthshaking menaces that would finally be resolved by cool-headed, rational professionals. For example, when everyone in a sleepy English village literally falls asleep, all the women become pregnant with super-powered alien babies in Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed twice as Village of the Damned ). And fireballs falling from space into the worlds’ oceans herald the arrival of unseen undersea alien invad...

The haunting dreams of Adam Blake’s fellow librarian Lily Torrence — now renamed Lucy — provide the springboard for The Invaders from the Golden Atom ( Strange Adventures 37, Oct. 1953). Finding that an old family ring has mysteriously appeared on her finger, Torrence, while sleepwalking, constructs a device that will permit beings from an atomic world within her ring to invade Earth. But Captain Comet uses the machine to shrink himself, defeating the aliens on their home ground. Just to be on the safe side, Torrence throws the ring into the ocean from the Cometeer. Adam Blake — after figuratively giving Torrence the back of his hand for the past two years — now, bizarrely and heavy-handedly, begins to flirt. “Too bad you had to lose your gold ring,” he says coyly. “But maybe someday I — er — a lucky man will place another on your marriage finger!” Forgetting about Miss Torrence’s name and Blake’s aloof relationship to her suggests that Schwartz and Broome were beginni...

DC’s tendency to work children’s preoccupations into its stories is on display again in The Grab-Bag Planet ( Strange Adventures 36, Sept. 1953), when giant mechanical claws start grabbing up goodies on Earth as part of a treasure hunt played by bored, amoral aliens from the planet Cnossur. The reference is obviously to those glass-fronted arcade claw machines that offer tempting gimcrack prizes. They became popular in the early 20 th century, inspired by the public’s fascination with the steam shovels that excavated the Panama and Erie canals. “A hand crank on the front allowed them to make a descent into a pile of hard candy to grab a small prize,” noted Jake Rossen. “The wheel was sensitive: A wild spin could get the crane moving, while a light, radio-dial touch could zero in on a target.” “When the Great Depression hit, they became a cheap way to risk what little money people had for the chance at a child’s trinket — maybe even a dollar wrapped around a pocket knife… By t...