October 1954: Comet at Twilight

In Captain Comet’s final adventure of the 1950s, the fictional futuristic man faces off against a symbol of society’s actual future — the computer.

Or so it seems.

In The Revolt of the Thinking Machine (Strange Adventures 49, Oct. 1954), the Man of Destiny communicates the history of what he presciently says may be his “final battle” to Prof. Zackro through the professor’s TV.

As newsboys shout that a Midwest University “thinking machine” has locked out the scientists who built it, Captain Comet tells Zackro, “I got to the Physics Building, of course, only moments after the story got out…”

Communicating through a typewriter, the “giant calculator” warns, “No one must interfere with what I am doing! If anyone forces his way into the room, I shall destroy him!”

The Man of 100,000 A.D. does just that as the machine blasts him with electric energy. “The bolts, of course, had no effect on me!” Comet tells Zackro. “My unique body instantly set up an immunity to the powerful charges.”

Stymied, the computer reveals that it had been building a cobalt bomb.

“I detected the presence on Earth of creatures unhuman and with weapons unearthly!” the computer tells Comet. “It was to combat the terrible threat of these aliens that I began to build the bomb. The aliens are in a section of the western desert, preparing for the attacks! My bomb could have stopped them, but now…”

The overstrained computer goes dead, with the bomb uncompleted.

So John Broome’s tale, drawn by Sy Barry, turns out to be a reverse-Frankenstein story, with the seemingly menacing creation actually working to defend humanity, not to harm it. It’s a theme familiar from 1940s science fiction, notably Isaac Asimov’s robot stories and Earl and Otto Binder’s Adam Link adventures.

This is another of those Broome stories in which something inhuman turns out to be surprisingly “humane,” with the supercomputer sacrificing itself to save us. Broome would return to that theme again in his later Green Lantern stories.

“It would take me too long to complete this cobalt bomb that the machine started to build!” Comet thinks. “I’ll have to handle the invaders in my own way — and at once!”

Rocketing to the west at spectrum-speed, the superhero telecasts his situation to Zackro, noting that through telepathic analysis he’d determined that “…the creatures down there — from a far-off star — are immune to all poison gases and explosive weapons!”

Flying to a huge irrigation dam in the mountains overlooking the desert, the Earth champion opened the floodgates.

“Elgni! Water! Someone has discovered our secret!” one of the aliens shouts. “Abandon all equipment! Into the ship! Quickly — before our very lives are lost!”

As the invaders’ ship rockets away from the planet, Captain Comet reveals to Zackro that he had telepathically determined that the aliens had located their base in a desert because they were life forms based on sodium chloride.

“Yes, professor! They were soluble in water — just like sodium chloride, or common table salt is. No doubt they hoped to conquer us before we found out their weakness!”

It’s an Achilles’ heel the invaders would share with the aliens in M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 film Signs — and with the Wicked Witch of the West, for that matter.

Meanwhile, back at Midwest University and none the wiser, the physicists have their supercomputer back in operation.

“It’s working again — and obediently!” a bow-tied scientist tells the superhero. “I’m beginning to think what happened was just an accident! After all, a machine can’t act on its own!”

Captain Comet knows differently, but keeps quiet, thinking, “But it did — and helped save the Earth!”

Captain Comet himself would stay out of sight until 1976 when, now a man out of his time like Captain America, he returned to Earth to infiltrate The Secret Society of Super Villains.

Yet soon after Comet’s disappearance, DC would effectively retool, recycle and reverse the concept. Instead of sending a telepathic, telekinetic human into space for heroics, they’d bring a telepathic, telekinetic alien to Earth for undercover derring-do in, of all things, Detective Comics.

The Martian Manhunter — debuting in Detective Comics 225 (Nov. 1955) and going on to help found the Justice League — would even be vulnerable to fire, like the Erotian invaders in Eyes of Other Worlds.

The concept of super powers would continue to intrigue comic book readers throughout the 1950s, often without being linked to superheroes. The cover story of Captain Comet’s last issue, for example, was The Brain Giants, and featured three suited-and-tied men raising a 2,000 pound-weight with their minds.

Strange Adventures was my favorite non-superhero title as a child, and I’d have been thrilled to know that a superhero had once starred in it. But I had the advantage of enjoying the title in its most polished period, an era in which it caught the streamlined, jet-age zeitgeist.

I’d argue that the best and sunniest issues of the title were published from 1955 through 1963. In Strange Adventures, children would find a satisfying reflection of the scientific and social optimism implied in JFK’s “New Frontier.”