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 ...

The sight of children at play startles stalwart Captain Comet in Strange Adventures 42 (March 1954). Why? The cover scene, repeated in the story, shows the Man of Destiny watching a costumed boy and girl playing at a Captain Comet adventure, and reminds me of a similarly charming scene in Fantastic Four 11 (Feb. 1963). Four children imitating the FF go from boisterous to awestruck when they’re treated to a good-natured demonstration of the real team’s super-powers. The Planet of Ancient Children is Comet’s inadvertent destination in Strange Adventures 42. The children playing remind him of the planet Glete, which is run by telepathically powered youngsters who age in reverse. “You must think I acted pretty strange back there with the kids,” Comet tells Prof. Zackro. “But you’ll understand when you’ve heard what I’m about to tell you…” During his first attempt at intergalactic flight in the Cometeer, the superhero’s ship was seized by a mysterious force and directed to Gle...

A classic science fiction story, The Day of the Triffids , gets a wink in Strange Adventures 38 (Nov. 1953). In John Wyndham’s 1951 novel, a freak meteor shower blinds most people on Earth, unleashing a plant menace and leading to the enslavement of the few remaining sighted people. DC’s science fiction stories often had a vibe similar to the “cozy catastrophe” novels for which Wyndham became famous. Whether the author was John Wyndham or John Broome, inexplicable and weird events would suddenly intrude on everyday reality, presaging some literally earthshaking menaces that would finally be resolved by cool-headed, rational professionals. For example, when everyone in a sleepy English village literally falls asleep, all the women become pregnant with super-powered alien babies in Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed twice as Village of the Damned ). And fireballs falling from space into the worlds’ oceans herald the arrival of unseen undersea alien invaders in Wynd...

What happened to Tuesday? Everyone on Earth slept through it in The Day That Vanished ( Strange Adventures 25, Oct. 1952), that’s what. The story begins with one of writer John Broome’s intriguing quotidian mysteries — a stock market tycoon discovers he’s lost a day on his calendar watch, an automatically timed back vault has somehow been left open for a day, an observatory discovers that the sun’s position proves it’s already Wednesday. When Prof. Zackro mentions the missing day to Captain Comet, he finds the superhero mysteriously unconcerned. And that’s because the only person who knows the truth is the man who secretly saved that day, Captain Comet, whose tireless futuristic form resisted the sleep-projecting weaponry of white-skinned, green-caped cyclopean invaders in search of a precious metal. Thinking back, the Man of Destiny recalls how his seismograph-like spaceship detector had led him to a U.S. Army base where everyone had been put to sleep. With the troops ob...

From the heights of Olympus, Captain Comet turned to the depths of Atlantis to find trouble in Slaves of the Sea-Master ( Strange Adventures 20, May 1952). The narrative hook on this John Broome/Murphy Anderson story is a strong one. All over America, as if sleepwalking, people begin marching toward the Atlantic Ocean — even a prisoner serving a life sentence whom guards machine-gun to death as he blindly climbs a prison wall. The story has something of the vibe of British novelist John Wyndham’s “cozy catastrophe” science fiction novels, which begin with some fascinating, inexplicable event — a worldwide meteor shower blinding everyone who watches it, an entire village falling asleep for a day — and build from there. The first of those, The Day of the Triffids, had been published the year before. Using the Cometeer to construct a glass wall at the ocean’s edge to prevent somnambulant citizens from drowning themselves in the Atlantic, the Man of Destiny deduces they...