Captain Comment

In 1976, Captain Comet took a leaf from another stalwart captain’s book, the one called America. Like that Marvel superhero, Adam Blake reappeared after having been missing for decades, apparently unaged. “He’s been across the galaxy twice aboard his Cometeer, visiting a thousand worlds with his flight belt, seeing sights no man has seen before him, or will ever see again,” wrote my old friend David Anthony Kraft, collaborating with Gerry Conway on the second issue of a fun title called The Secret Society of Super Villains (July-Aug. 1976). Pablo Marcos penciled. Out of touch in deep space for two decades, Comet couldn’t be expected to tell a superhero from a supervillain, so he waded into a skirmish against Green Lantern on the side of what he presumed to be underdogs, Grodd the Super Gorilla and the playing-card themed Hi-Jack. Actually, given his own past experience with evil super-gorillas and the fact that he’s telepathic, Captain Comet might have been a bit more suspicious. Whate...

By 1957, comic book super powers were sometimes more subtle than those of the wall-smashing wonders who had started to appear in the late 1930s. Take for example the odd little gem The Future Mind of Roger Davis in Strange Adventures 83 (Aug. 1957), drawn by Gil Kane with a script by Ed Herron. Like the superheroic spaceman Captain Comet (whose run in Strange Adventures had ended three years earlier), Davis had the brain of someone evolved 100,000 years beyond his time. But he was no mutant like the earlier champion of justice. Instead, the winter sportsman Davis acquired his powers when the landing of an alien spacecraft spooked his horse and upset his sleigh, causing him brain damage. Yellow-skinned, nose-less, balloon-headed aliens repair Davis’ brain, and in doing so vastly improve it. The revived Davis thinks he can read the aliens’ minds, but one of them explains that he is mistaken, saying, “The ultra-perceptive area of the brain in your evolutionary stage of life has not yet ...