Captain Comment

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...

Two H.G. Wells stories helped inspire Strange Adventures 33 (June 1953). In The Human Beehive , Adam Blake travels to an irradiated South Pacific island to find tiny mammals and gigantic insects, including a super-intelligent colony of bees that has apparently enslaved the tiny human islanders. “Captain Comet is always going on journeys to other places: often planets, here an island,” observed comics historian Michael E. Grost.   “(Writer John) Broome often liked his heroes to travel. We also learn here that Captain Comet is resistant to all forms of radiation, just like Broome's Atomic Knights to come. This story is crammed with small details and little plot ideas of all kinds. Although the Captain Comet tales are short, usually six pages, Broome tried to get as much story into them as possible.” The discovery of a monstrous minnow near a nuclear test site sends Captain Comet to the South Pacific. In fact, the U.S. had detonated its first hydrogen bomb at Eniwet...

The convention of the female counterpart who mirrors the male hero is a long-running one in superhero stories, and includes Pat Savage, Catwoman, Mary Marvel, Hawkgirl, Doll Girl, Fly-Girl, Batwoman, Batgirl, Power Girl, Supergirl and others. Captain Comet had two of them — first the alien mutant Radea and then, in Strange Adventures 26 (Nov. 1952), the futuristic Miss Universe. With Captain Comet off in space and a giant meteor threatening Earth, Zackro uses his new “time hook” to fetch a beautiful superwoman from 100,000 A.D., an era in which fashion apparently runs to green swimsuits. Dubbed “Miss Universe” by the newspapers, her exploits make Captain Comet seem old hat. “She acts like a true champion of humanity — and yet somehow I don’t trust her!” the Man of Destiny thinks. “Or am I giving vent to jealousy? I wonder…” It’s the same reaction the overshadowed Scarlet Speedster would have in another Broome story, The Mystery of the Elongated Man , in The Flash ...