February 1954: All Our Tomorrows

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 it, and vanished before his daughter’s eyes along with his time-traveling device. H.G. Wells Time Machine idea was almost 60 years old by 1954, a science fiction cliché. But writer John Broome has a few new wrinkles in time for us.

The Man of 100,000 A.D. asks to see the scientist’s notes.

“Why, Captain Comet, how can you read so fast?” Linda exclaims.

“My mind takes a split second to photograph each page, Linda!” the superhero explains. “Now, do you have a television set? I can use parts of this television unit — and by altering the electronic mode, duplicate the energy-force of your father’s time travel machine!”

Building a half-open, egg-shaped vehicle, Comet prepares to pursue Linda’s father to 50,000 A.D., but Linda jumps in to join him on the odyssey.

“Linda — she was too quick for me!” Comet thinks as they slip through the multi-colored slipstreams of time. “What a brave girl!”

“He’s fearless, risking his life to aid my dad and me!” Linda thinks. “I couldn’t let him go alone!”

The suggestion of a mutual admiration between the two shows how the character has subtly evolved since his first adventures, when he regarded 20^th century human women with indifference, virtually as members of a different species.

A miscalculation has sent the pair back to the Cretaceous Period, where a Tyrannosaurus rex displays an unhealthy interest in them.

Whisking them away to the far future in the literal and proverbial nick of time, Captain Comet is surprised to be expected and welcomed in the far future.

“Here me! All is peaceful here in the future — as you call it! But it has not always been so!” explains a counselor assigned to greet them.

Like several other wise men drawn by Murphy Anderson, he has a vaguely godlike look — long white hair and a beard, wearing a golden circlet.

The counselor tells them that 30 years before, a runaway comet had threatened to destroy 80 percent of the human population with heat and radioactivity. Earth’s Science Council proposed saving some of the planet’s finest brains by sending them into the past through a newly developed time travel technique.

“We will send the young men into different eras — one to each era — so as not to disturb the continuum of time!” explains one of the Science Councilors. “After the danger is passed, we can summon them back — to lead us in rebuilding the Earth!”

Linda’s father Jeris Bartlett had been sent to 1923, where the effects of time travel would enable him to retain his memories of the future for only an hour after his arrival. He became a famous physicist, married and had a child without knowing who he really was.

When the disaster finally passed, the future leaders communicated with Bartlett’s unconscious mind “by teletronic means while he slept” to instruct him how to build a time machine and return to his true era.

So Linda is reunited with her father — but he doesn’t remember her, the effects of time travel now having wiped away his memory of the 30 years he spent in the 20^th century.

Facing the same fate, Captain Comet and Linda are urged to return to their own era. But Linda wants to stay with her father, and the superhero says he won’t leave until he knows Linda will be safe.

“Young man, the laws of time travel affect the mind — but the heart has its own form of memory,” Linda’s father tells him. “Leave her with me — in time she will be a daughter to me again.”

“That’s what I wanted to hear, Dr. Bartlett,” Captain Comet says.

Back in 1954, Prof. Zackro finds the Man of Destiny dismantling what appears to be an important device.

“It is, professor,” Captain Comet confirms. “But Earth really won’t need it for another 50,000 years!”

A decade later, Broome would again feature the themes of memory loss and time travel in a series-within-a-series of stories for the Green Lantern title. Summoned periodically to the 58^th century to thwart various menaces, Hal Jordan would lose his memory but be supplied with an artificial identity, that of “Pol Manning.”

We can also see an echo of Superman’s origin in this story, although instead of a baby, the doomed advanced society decides to save its finest minds. At one point, Superman’s creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had considered having the child sent not from Krypton, but from Earth’s future — a true Man of Tomorrow.

The Captain Comet story hinted at the possibility of romance for the hero, then immediately extinguished it when his potential love interest elected to stay in the future.

That theme of lovers separated by centuries would be later echoed in the Star Trek episodes The City on the Edge of Forever (1967) and All Our Yesterdays (1969), as well as the 1980 film Somewhere in Time (based on the 1975 Richard Matheson novel Bid Time Return).

The note struck here is more wistful than tragic, but it’s the same note.

This story is rare in that it turns on a mystery that must be solved, rather than an enemy who must be defeated. The tale includes no true antagonist, other than one easily evaded dinosaur.