Captain Comment

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...

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...