Captain Comment

A Cold War “enemy within” vibe continues in Strange Adventures 44 (May 1954), when evil, intelligent alien plants disguise themselves as terrestrial trees.   “Without detection, the aliens landed on Earth — threatening the very existence of humanity!” proclaims the splash-page narration. The trees that loom menacingly and grasp at Captain Comet and his companion Joyce Rollins look a good deal like the hostile anthropomorphic trees in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz — a film that CBS would begin airing annually two years later, on Nov. 3, 1956. The Plant That Plotted Murder provides another echo of John Wyndham and his 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids . The tale anticipates The Plant That Hated Humans ( Strange Adventures 150, March 1963). That Atomic Knights story — also by John Broome and Murphy Anderson — features telepathic, malevolent plants. Cold war fears involving alien plant life would be famously spotlighted in late 1954 with the serial publication of Jack Finney’s ...

Invisibility and flight are considered to be the top two fantasy super powers, and I’ve long been intrigued by any story that featured either. For example, the 1935 Doc Savage adventure The Spook Legion, featuring an invisible criminal gang, was the first that prompted me to part with the two quarters necessary to buy one of the Man of Bronze’s Bantam paperback reprints. The dramatic hook: how could a protagonist possibly overcome invisible enemies? In 1953, the Man of Destiny faced the same predicament. When a hydrogen bomb is stolen from a Pacific atoll during a test countdown, accredited observer Captain Comet traces the crime to invisible thieves from the planet Lamia in Devil’s Island in Space ( Strange Adventures 28, Jan. 1953). Devil’s Island, a penal colony in French Guiana, was notorious for its harsh treatment of prisoners. The island penitentiary operated from 1852 until the very year this issue of Strange Adventures was published. Turns out that the Septarch...

When rudely rebuffed by a library patron who is leafing through books, Adam Blake thinks, “I don’t ordinarily do this, but I’m going to use my telepathic powers to read his mind.” Blake discovers that the man is instantly memorizing every page he sees. So begins The Brain-Pirates of Planet X in Strange Adventures 23 (Aug. 1952). Tracing this mental marvel to a lonely spot in Midwest National Park, Captain Comet and Prof. Zackro find the man gathering with dozens of duplicates at a spacecraft. Secretly disabling the ship with telekinesis, Comet buys enough time to discover that, between them, these identical men have memorized all the knowledge on Earth. While the Man of Destiny tracks down the doppelgängers’ base in space, Zackro phones the Pentagon, saying, “Captain Comet wants those men held here, General — by armed force if necessary!” “If Captain Comet wants it, that’s enough for us, Professor!” the general replies. Must be nice to be Captain Co...