Captain Comment

Frank R. Stockton’s much-anthologized 1882 short story The Lady, or the Tiger? gets a science-fiction update in The Lady or the Tiger-Man ( Strange Adventures  34, July 1953). Captain Comet discovers a planet that seems to be telepathically subjugated by the mind dictator Esklon, who has the white-suited bald fanatic look of Superman’s early foe the Ultra-Humanite—a look designed, in this case, to deceive the reader. Because when Esklon forces Comet to choose between doors which contain a beautiful girl and a powerful, caped Tiger-Man, Esklon uses the distraction of the super-hero’s ensuing struggle with the beastman as an opportunity to kill the Tiger-Man, who was the planet’s true mind dictator. The story ends with a surprise: Rana, Esklon’s sister and the girl behind the door, stows away on the Cometeer and flies to Earth with Captain Comet “…to learn things that might help my people.” In the last panel, Adam Blake introduces her to Zackro as his new library ...

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...