Captain Comet Deals with Dinosaurs

The mutant superhero Captain Comet returned in Strange Adventures 11 (Aug. 1951) for his third appearance, but second adventure.

Titled The Day the Past Came Back, this story by writer John Broome and artist Carmine Infantino starts by pitting this transitional superhero figure against one of my favorite foes, a Tyrannosaurus rex (this one revived from a skeleton in the Midwest City Museum Hall of Fossils).

Luckily, librarian Adam Blake is nearby. Wading into the action while museum patrons panic, the Man of Destiny uses superhuman strength to handily hurl away the dinosaur. But he learns that Capitol City (apparently Washington, D.C.) is overrun by brontosauruses, pterodactyls, devolved humans and other prehistoric menaces, thanks to an evolution reverser ray invented by Dr. Alex Philador, who has decided humanity is evil and requires a reboot.

The tale anticipates DC’s Silver Age gorilla fetish as Comet himself is devolved into an ape. But the simian superhero, retaining his advanced intelligence, surprises Philador and saves the day. The exploit ends with the humble librarian asking his coworker Miss Torrence to tell jim just how wonderful Captain Comet is.

The increasingly streamlined art and the science fictional themes pointed directly at the superheroic ingredients that would converge to spark the Silver Age of Comics five years later, in Showcase 4 (Sept.-Oct. 1956).

Captain Comet: If They Only Knew...

As a writer, I like to retain, recycle and recast material I’ve written when it might be useful again, and DC Comics also long practiced this form of intellectual thrift.

For example, compare the Murphy Anderson covers of Strange Adventures 35 (The Cosmic Chessboard, Aug. 1953) and Justice League of America 1 (The World of No Return, Oct-Nov. 1960).

In both cases, heroes are playing a cosmic chess match that imperils real people, and both stories even feature a dinosaur fin-headed alien who sports a third eye, (one green-skinned, the other red-skinned). That’s one easy “tell” for recognizing the hand of particular comic book artists, by the way. They all tend to have distinctive types of fantasy aliens that they draw.

For DC, publishing in an era in which it was expected that readers would begin and then stop reading their product within a span of five to seven years, it made good business sense to recycle fantasy ideas that had proven popular. Hence all those intelligent gorillas…

Note, too, the way John Broome’s Captain Comet story might slyly be read as merely the daydream of a frustrated librarian.

When Adam Blake offers a suggestion to a chess player in Midwest City Park, the man sneers at his intellectual abilities. Then the inconspicuous librarian muses that he is really a secret superman who saved Earth and other planets in a recent cosmic chess match against an extraterrestrial despot, but of course nobody on this planet knows that…

Superheroes as wish fulfillment? Could it be?

Extra! Captain Comet Thwarts Robot Revolt!

I have always had a special fondness for Captain Comet, the first mutant superhero in comic books. Created by John Broome and Carmine Infantino (and drawn above by Murphy Anderson and Joe Giella), the character is poised precisely between the Golden and Silver Ages, an oasis in the superhero desert of the early 1950s, and foreshadows the streamlined elegance of DC science fiction and superheroes like the Flash. A true Man of Tomorrow — he is evolved 100,000 years beyond his time — Captain Comet was a Superman updated from the Depression to the postwar flying saucer era. The story above is from Strange Adventures 29 (1953).

DC Comics always had more giant, threatening tops than one would imagine (from Strange Adventures 10, July 1951)

Here's the first part of the mutant superhero Captain Comet's origin story from Strange Adventures 9 (June 1951).