January 1954: The Spider Who Loved Me

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 observing.

Stories of women who paralyze men with their beauty no doubt predate recorded history. Here we have not the traditional femme fatale, but an araignée mortelle.

The creature’s evolution continues until she is all brain, encased in a transparent flying dome with mechanical eyestalks. However, she reverts to her female human form because she desires Comet for her mate and believes what he says — a fact he is able to use to trap and devolve her.

“You … tricked me, Captain Comet!” she exclaims.

“ I had to — for the safety of the Earth,” the mutant superhero replies, giving as original an excuse for dumping a girlfriend as any I’ve heard.

“From a potential ruler of the world — to a tiny, abject spider — in one brief evening!” Comet thinks. “What irony — and who would believe it!”

Again, the Man of Destiny’s compassion is evident. He tells Zackro he’s putting a male spider in with the female because “…I — er — have reason to believe the female is lonely.”

A decade later, in Green Lantern 24 (Oct. 1963), writer John Broome would revisit the concept of a super-evolved animal menace in The Shark That Hunted Human Prey! A nuclear accident turns a common shark into a telepathic, near-omnipotent humanoid predator. Green Lantern is able to devolve the Shark, but he’ll return as one of Green Lantern’s most menacing arch-foes.

Elements of the tale would also be echoed at Marvel in Ant-Man’s enemy The Scarlet Beetle and the original origin of Spider-Woman, who began as a spider herself.

The super-spider actually had greater mental powers than even the mutant Man of 100,000 A.D., but was finally unable to overcome the human capacity for insincerity.

Ironic indeed, as they say in the comic books.