Captain Comment

Captain Comet’s version of Grodd, the “diabolically intelligent” Man-Ape, returns as a criminal defendant in The Guilty Gorilla ( Strange Adventures 39, Dec. 1953). By telepathically controlling a judge and manhandling police officers like rag dolls, the simian is able to escape and recruit a criminal gang to help him. This super-gorilla, Comet’s only recurring archenemy, foreshadows the string of early appearances by Grodd in the Silver Age Flash title. DC’s over-reliance on gorilla covers would become an affectionately mocked cliché in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The trend started in Strange Adventures . “The eighth issue of Strange Adventures achieved some sort of cult status,” noted Greg Hyland. “The cover showed a gorilla in a zoo holding up a slate that read, ‘Please believe me! I am the victim of a terrible scientific experiment!’ This Incredible Story of an Ape with a Human Brain had strong sales, and [DC editor, Julius] Schwartz recalls that (publisher) ‘Irwin...

DC Co­­­mics’ Strange Adventures might be called the predawn of the Silver Age. For example, in several ways, Strange Adventures 32 (May 1953) prefigures the revamped revival of the Flash three years later. And Captain Comet, the title’s lead feature, is clearly a forerunner for the streamlined jet-age superheroes to come. At the end of his previous adventure, librarian Lily Torrence, seeing Captain C­­­­­­omet for the first time on television, had remarked to Adam Blake that they look awfully similar. Blake tries to cover up in that feeble Clark Kent manner — “Oh, it’s, er, just your imagination, Miss Torrence!” But he needn’t have bothered, since by the next issue he has apparently forgotten he has a secret identity. In Strange Adventures 32, Murphy Anderson’s art shows us Captain Comet at the front door of Blake’s house, receiving a telegram sent to him by a scientist in Africa. The Western Union deliveryman is impressed that Comet clairvoyantly knows w...

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...