March 1954: The Power of Childhood

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 directed to Glete.

Greeted telepathically by the boy leader Tandar, the Man of 100,000 A.D. learns that the “children” had been able to read his mind even when he was far away in space.

“All our scientific weapons have failed to protect us from the terrible monster that we call the Frall, which attacks us once a century, wreaking havoc among us!” Tandar tells him. “And the time for the Frall to appear again is almost here…”

Clearly, that’s a job for a superhero. When the huge, yellow, bat-winged Frall attacks, the mutant superman blasts it when telekinetic force — to no effect.

“Tandar said that all their radiation weapons were useless against it too!” Comet thinks. “There can be only one answer… My super-analytic brain deduced that the Frall possessed some natural defense against all radiation.”

With his “futuristic strength,” Comet tears apart an iron gate and uses one of its bars as a lance against the space-dragon.

Although he rescues the children, the superhero remains wary of them, and is cagey when they ask the location of Earth.

“I wasn’t taking chances, Professor,” he tells Zackro. “Those amazing ancient children of Glete were far advanced over us scientifically! Who knows! A visit by them to Earth might have turned out to be an invasion!”

Meanwhile, elsewhere in 1954, a society of sinister human children would be the focus of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies. The story anticipates the 1966 Star Trek episode Miri, and baleful alien children would also feature in John Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed twice as Village of the Damned),

And let’s face it, children were taking over society in 1954, a year that marked the midpoint of the postwar Baby Boom. A total of 76 million Americans were born between 1946 and 1964.

“In addition to the size of the group, Steve Gillon has suggested that one thing that sets the baby boomers apart from other generational groups is the fact that ‘almost from the time they were conceived, Boomers were dissected, analyzed and pitched to by modern marketers, who reinforced a sense of generational distinctiveness,’” Wikipedia notes. “This is supported by the articles of the late 1940s identifying the increasing number of babies as an economic boom, such as a 1948 Newsweek article whose title proclaimed ‘Babies Mean Business,’ or a 1948 Time magazine article called ‘Baby Boom.’”

No wonder then that, despite the advent of television, comic books were still selling handily.

By 1960, the top-selling comic book, Dell’s Uncle Scrooge, had a circulation of 1,040,543. DC’s Superman weighed in at 810,000, and Strange Adventures at 207,000 (a feat achieved, by then, without Captain Comet’s help).