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 ...

In Strange Adventures 41 (Feb. 1954), Captain Comet Dr. Whos his way from the Cretaceous to 50,000 A.D. in The Beast from Out of Time . The story begins when library information clerk Adam Blake gets a question he could easily answer, but doesn’t dare: where can Captain Comet be found? Linda Bartlett’s father, the nuclear physicist Jeris Bartlett, has mysteriously disappeared, and she doesn’t think the police will believe her bizarre story — but Captain Comet might. A meeting is quickly arranged, and Linda tells the mutant superhero that for years, her job was to sit beside her father as he slept and write down what he might say. She was a kind of hypnagogic stenographer. “Let me see what I was sleep-talking about last might,” Dr. Bartlett says one morning. “Hmm. Time travel! Isn’t it strange, Linda — that my unconscious mind should be so much more active than my conscious one” Working without food or rest, Dr. Bartlett completed his time machine, turned a dial to test i...

In Strange Adventures 40 (Jan. 1954), Captain Comet confronts yet another a beautiful mental marvel, this one a thief whose energy beams can paralyze bonded messengers. I say “yet another” because this menace, The Mind Monster, was the third psi-powered superwoman the Man of Destiny had run into since his debut in 1951. First came the 18-year-old mutant Radea, The Girl from the Diamond Planet, in Strange Adventures 12 (Sept. 1951). She was followed in Strange Adventures 26 (Nov. 1952) by Miss Universe, who turned out to a super-evolved plant being from a world that would someday occupy Earth’s position in space. That would probably have disqualified her from the first Miss Universe Pageant, actually held in Long Beach, California, earlier that same year. When the police backtrack The Mind Monster to Prof. Zackro’s lab, Comet discovers that she is in fact a spider who has been hyper-evolved by exposure to the concentrated radiation from a supernova the professor had been ob...

The haunting dreams of Adam Blake’s fellow librarian Lily Torrence — now renamed Lucy — provide the springboard for The Invaders from the Golden Atom ( Strange Adventures 37, Oct. 1953). Finding that an old family ring has mysteriously appeared on her finger, Torrence, while sleepwalking, constructs a device that will permit beings from an atomic world within her ring to invade Earth. But Captain Comet uses the machine to shrink himself, defeating the aliens on their home ground. Just to be on the safe side, Torrence throws the ring into the ocean from the Cometeer. Adam Blake — after figuratively giving Torrence the back of his hand for the past two years — now, bizarrely and heavy-handedly, begins to flirt. “Too bad you had to lose your gold ring,” he says coyly. “But maybe someday I — er — a lucky man will place another on your marriage finger!” Forgetting about Miss Torrence’s name and Blake’s aloof relationship to her suggests that Schwartz and Broome were beginni...

This Captain Comet adventure influenced the Silver Age revival of one of DC’s most popular superheroes. In Guardians of the Clockwork Universe ( Strange Adventures 22, July 1952), the Man of Destiny is telepathically summoned by the wizened, golden-skinned Guardians of the Universe, an ancient, advanced race working to keep planets and suns in their proper orbits. The story is framed as a flashback. When a young patron asks Midwest City public librarian Adam Blake what keeps the planets where they are, Blake replies, “Er, gravitational force,” but thinks: “That’s only part of the answer, but he’d never believe the actual truth.” He recalls that he’d been tinkering with his “private jetship” the Cometeer in its shed behind Prof. Zackro’s lab when he received a telepathic message. “The thought-beam, steady as a radio signal, led me far out into space … where, beyond the reaches of our solar system, I saw that tiny world … shining by some unearthly, sunless light.” Called to...

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 ...