Captain Comment

This month’s adventure reaches back to “long, long ago,” when Zus, Merkry, Hurkles, and other Olympian rulers left Earth in a “sky vessel,” traveling in suspended animation and awakening one at a time, at half-century intervals, to search for true immortality. “Someday ... somewhere in the universe, the secret of immortality will be discovered!,” says Zus. By extending their lives indefinitely through hibernation, these proto-gods intend to acquire it. Encountering their ship in Strange Adventures 19 (April 1952), Captain Comet finds Merkry, in his winged helmet, testing an alien scientist’s claim of immortality by killing him with a “letho-ray.” Oh well. Back to the drawing board, as they say. In a space chase, Comet radios to demand that the murderous would-be deities surrender to face justice, but they only laugh at him. “He wants to put Zus on trial!,” the leader says. “Stand aside — while I destroy that young meddler with my own special brand of death.” Dodging Zus’...

Although Captain Comet would be publicly known on Earth, many of his adventures would occur in space, in secret. In that, he would anticipate the two Stranges — Stephen and Adam — who frequently battle menaces humanity knows nothing about. The Stranges and the Strange Adventures hero were all super-heroes protecting humanity from dangers on some bizarre frontier. Nevertheless, the hero’s second adventure, in Strange Adventures 11 (Aug. 1951), would be earthbound. Titled The Day the Past Came Back, this story by Broome and artist Infantino starts by pitting Comet against one of my favorite foes, a Tyrannosaurus rex (this one revived from a skeleton in the Midwest City Museum Hall of Fossils). Wading into the action while museum patrons panic, the Man of Destiny uses superhuman strength to handily hurl aside the dinosaur. Then he learns that Capitol City (apparently Washington, D.C.) is overrun by brontosauruses, pterodactyls, devolved humans, and other prehistoric me...

Strange Adventures 10 finished Captain Comet's two-part origin and launched him on his first adventure. Captain Comet blazed the trail in a feature that looked much more like 1960 than 1940. The sleek elegance of Carmine Infantino’s art was emergent. It would be contemporary, clean-lined and sunlit, as optimistic and reassuring as the stories by John Broome. Infantino made the impossible seem pleasantly plausible, somehow putting the future within easy reach. “The mature Infantino drew everything — a hidden city of scientific gorillas, a harlequin committing crimes with toys, Flash strapped to a giant boomerang — as if he believed absolutely in its existence,” observed Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs in their excellent book The Comic Book Heroes. “But Infantino’s art could so fully evoke the quiet of a small-town afternoon or the cool of a shaded lawn that readers could forgive even plots full of beatniks, schoolteachers and singing idols.” The equally capable ...