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).

The Can-Do Camelot Era in DC Comics

The scientific and social optimism of the Kennedy era was perfectly reflected, for children, in DC Comics’ Strange Adventures. I’d argue that the title’s best and sunniest issues appeared during those “New Frontier” years.

And one of them was Strange Adventures 137 (Feb. 1962), with Parade of the Space-Toys! cover-featured. The Murphy Anderson cover is almost hypnotic in its balance and appeal, with colorful, fascinating super-scientific military toys marching, rolling and flying down the street to save the Earth.

Space troops, rocket soldiers, futuristic tanks, missiles and robots — just the stuff to superheat the imagination of a little boy.

The cover story by Anderson and writer Gardner Fox tells us how an alien neuro-ray eliminates human aggression, ending the war in Southeast Asia, juvenile gang rumbles and even prize fights. Unfortunately, it also eliminates the human will to resist the aliens’ invasion.

Luckily, bespectacled scientist and toy soldier hobbyist Dave Gibson will be able to save the day with the help of a friendly alien, Zard Yat, whose “panacure beam” restores Gibson’s will to resist. Zard Yat telekinetically animates Gibson’s toy soldiers, outfitting them with microelectronic bombs to be used against the alien fleet.

As JFK himself appears in silhouette to rally the world, the tiny toys defeat the invasion force, and human aggression returns as the neuro-ray wears off.

But the encounter with alien attack has taught our species its lesson about uniting against a common threat. The juvenile rivalries are now settled on the playing field, and the war in Southeast Asia is ended.

If only.

The optimistic themes that characterized Julius Schwartz’ DC science fiction titles are continued in the next story, Meteor-Rider of the Universe!, drawn by Carmine Infantino from a script by Fox.

Another heroic scientist, astronomer and professor Bill Horne, finds a glowing meteor that sends him a telepathic cry for help. Inside is Ptandol, a green insectoid alien scientist from the planet Fralimar who has been in suspended animation for millions of years.

Ptandol’s planet was destroyed by a space vortex that now threatens Earth, a menace he could tell us how to thwart — and yet he can’t, because he has fallen into a life-sustaining sleep.

However, knowing there is a solution is enough to enable Horne to reason it out without awakening and killing Ptandol.

Again, human ingenuity, pluck and compassion prove equal to any threat, and the last panel of the story implies that Horne will have more adventures with his newly awakened new pal Ptandol.

A super-intelligent green alien insect friend/pet who sits on your shoulder like a space-age Jiminy Cricket? Sign me up!

Note the DC writers’ and editors’ adroitness at working childish wish fulfillment into each story — an alien genie who can bring your toy soldiers to life, a colorful insect friend and, finally, a friendly robot.

Writer John Broome and artist Mike Sekowsky provided the third tale, The Case of the Robot Brother. Star Hawkins, a humorously cynical, down-at-heel 1940s-style private eye operating in the late 21^st century, had been appearing in Strange Adventures since issue 114 (March 1960).

What made the series work was his loyal, often-worried and always endearing secretary, a robot named Ilda (a wink at Mike Hammer’s secretary Velda, who was frequently winked at). In this adventure, Ilda’s robot brother has gone criminal, literally because he has a screw loose.

“If the series had been done completely straight, it would have come off as hackneyed,” comics historian Don Markstein noted. “But Ilda’s dual role as both friend and companion, and pawnable asset in times of stress, set the tone for a wonky take on the genre. The detective did serious work in solving his cases, but always got chuckles out of the readers along the way.”

That adds up to three perfectly satisfying stories in a single issue of this anthology title, at the then-current rate of four cents a story. Not bad.

DC Comics Gives the Children a Big Hand

A young couple is driving in a convertible on a sunny day, top down, as a giant hand looms above them. Preparing to seize them? To crush them? How can they possibly escape?

That was the “grabber” of a Gil Kane cover on Strange Adventures 110 (Nov. 1959), and it certainly seized my attention when I saw it in DC Comics house ads at age 5.

I speculated for a long time about what was going in that comic, but never got a chance to read the story until years later. And by that time, I wasn’t surprised to learn that the occult hand was no threat at all.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, in DC’s sunny science fiction titles, alien invasions were routinely thwarted by pet dogs and postmen, and plesiosaurs were tamed and put on display at SeaWorld. The threats implied by the covers were tamed, too, and while that may have made the contents of the comics a little less exciting, it also cut down on the ensuing nightmares.

DC, following not merely the letter but also the spirit of the Comes Code, built reassurance into their stories. The writers, editors and artists took their responsibility to their audience of small children seriously.

Responsibility was in fact the theme of the 9-page story The Hand from Beyond, written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Carmine Infantino, and the tale turns out to be a perfect example of the type.

The mysterious giant hand appears throughout Bill Vickers’ life, always to protect him from deadly peril. Why? Because an alien scientific experiment gone wrong had accidentally impaired Bill’s adrenal glands as a boy, depriving him of the “fight-or-flight” response humans need to help them survive in an emergency. The giant hand was the aliens’ way of protecting him from the damage they’d done.

The issue includes two more science fiction stories and those science fact features that DC always included during an era when Americans still respected facts and science. Technological advances had, after all, just ended World War II and were about to send humanity to the moon. Enticing house ads for the former Quality Comics title Blackhawk and the new features Suicide Squad and Green Lantern were also included.

In the end, Vickers recovers his sense of danger and rejects the aliens’ protection, a decision I’d have advised him to rethink. Having a giant hand always pop up to shield me from mortal harm is the kind of problem I could live with.

The Grin on the Mushroom Cloud

For 13 days in 1962, when I was 8, my grandparents and the other adults around me were tight-lipped and white-faced. They tried to reassure children like me as best they could, but found it rough going. That’s because they knew we might be mere minutes from the end of human civilization.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba, was the closest humanity came to all-out nuclear war.

That’s why it’s ironic to see a smiling mushroom cloud on the cover of DC Comics’ Strange Adventures 143 (Aug. 1962).

In this Gardner Fox-Murphy Anderson adventure, alien conquerors called the Andrann are coolly outsmarted by American professionals who display the typical Julius Schwartz-edited traits of optimism, ethics, bravery and scientific rationalism (in this case a rudimentary working knowledge of geology). When iron pyrite is switched for power-giving gold, both the U.S. and an alien planet are saved — a routine outcome in the sunny universe of DC science fiction.

Born in the early part of the 20^th century, having survived two world wars and the Great Depression, Julius Schwartz and his writers and artists had an implicit faith in scientific and material progress that was brightly reflected in their stories. They had grown up reading can-do space opera science fiction like E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman stories (a precursor to the Green Lantern Corps).

Superheroes aside, in the Schwartz stable’s stories competent American middle-class professionals were perfectly capable of saving the day. And even in the superhero stories created by this team, the superhumans and their friends shared those values and those occupations. They were the young urban professionals who embodied the zeitgeist of President Kennedy’s forward-looking New Frontier — police scientists, lawyers, test pilots, journalists, university professors and museum curators.

Tales in which even mushroom clouds are rendered harmless and benign seem silly now, I know. But this kind of cheerful, effective resourcefulness was quite reassuring to young readers like me in the early 1960s, an era when American adults took their responsibilities to children seriously — at least in the comic books.

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?

How to Handle an Intelligent, Invisible Dinosaur

In the sunlit world of DC Comics’ Silver Age, it wasn’t just superheroes who could repel the alien invasions that seemed to arrive every week or two.

With a little courage, a cool head and a reasonably intelligent layman’s scientific knowledge, about anybody could do it. Think what a reassuring idea that was to a child of the early 1960s.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re a small-town jeweler, and Earth is being invaded by intelligent, invisible dinosaurs…

 “I read The Invisible Dinosaur in its first appearance in Strange Adventures 133 (1961),” noted Pappy’s Golden Age Blogzine. “At the time I didn’t think there was anything unusual about this totally screwball story. Wristwatches that cause vibrations that negate the effects of aliens with whips who control humans. Intelligent dinosaurs, descended from Earth dinosaurs of 175 million years ago, captured for an interplanetary zoo. And said dinosaurs are invisible on Earth. I did not think any of that was extraordinary, nor did I question how something invisible could cast a shadow. My critical thinking skills were yet to develop, I guess.

“In those days I was more interested in looking at the Murphy Anderson art. Murphy was one of my favorite artists from the Julius Schwartz editorial stable. What I see now when I look at this story is another immaculately drawn tale with an absurd plot, rendered completely straight-faced.”

I think the Gardner Fox/John Broome method was to dazzle you with one pseudoscientific and/or scientific and/or frankly fantastic reference after another, all of which only SEEMED to connect plausibly. The stories, of course, came from the covers. The stories were merely a process of trying to justify the covers.

As Philip Rushton observed, “Those intelligent, invisible dinosaurs got everywhere when I was a kid in the 1960s!” Yes, as a child, I too was kind of surrounded by invisible dinosaurs, not to mention superheroes. How nice to find a comic book that reflected my, er, “reality.”

Fascinated by the Face That Wasn't There

Sometimes the comic books you saw in ads but didn’t get to read could be as fascinating as the comics that you actually paid your dime or 12 cents to buy.

At times, they could even be more compelling, because not knowing the story behind the covers forced you into the delightful practice of using your imagination and speculating — of writing, in effect, just the way Gardner Fox and John Broome did.

Such was the case with Strange Adventures 124 (Jan. 1961), which introduced the Faceless Creature.

By 1961, mere aliens from other planets had gotten rather old hat in DC Comics’ Strange Adventures. So the Faceless Hunter wasn’t merely from the planet Saturn, but from Klaramar, a sub-atomic world revolving within an atom on Saturn that operates within a different temporal field than the Earth. Now THAT’S what I call an alien! One Klaramarian day equals a million Earth years (a fact that renders the two sequels to the first story impossible, but we’ll forget about that).

The first Faceless Creature was Klee-Pan, a benevolent alien who inexplicably seems to be stealing the faces from terrestrial monuments. In fact, he is seeking a bomb that will destroy the solar system, one has been locked by the evil Chen Yull into a vault which can only be opened by some giant head.

Visiting Mount Rushmore, Klee-Pan teamed up with two South Dakota Highway Patrolmen, Jim Boone and Bob Colby, to save our worlds. As a reward, Klee-Pan enabled the two police officers to telepathically communicate with each other. The two would return in Strange Adventures 142 (July 1962) to battle Chen Yull himself, and then Chen Yull would return to threaten humanity again in Strange Adventures 153 (June 1963).

Mike Sekowsky, Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane did the artistic honors for the Fox stories.

Elegantly designed, weirdly powered, smooth-faced, pleasantly orange giant aliens, recurring human protagonists who gain superhuman abilities, and DC’s customarily reassuring “cozy catastrophe” science fiction scenarios — I was right the first time. If I’d had the chance to read these tales when they were published, I would have loved them.

I Was the Reader Without Animal Powers

I was 11 when those aliens gave stunt man Buddy Baker his animal powers in DC’s Strange Adventures 180 (Sept. 1965), courtesy of writer Dave Wood and artist Carmine Infantino.

I enjoyed his adventure then and in The Return of the Man with Animal Powers (Strange Adventures 184, Jan. 1966), despite the fact that his super powers caused cognitive dissonance even in a child.

For example, how could you “borrow” the flying ability of an eagle without also acquiring wings or an avian bone structure? Superman’s powers — mostly amplifications of human abilities — seemed almost plausible by comparison.

But Infantino’s clean-lined, graceful art was always refreshing to the eye, and I also found it refreshing that Baker chose to go into super-powered action without fancy dress. Much as I love superhero costumes, the cliché was already becoming a bit shopworn by 1965. I had been attracted to Gold Key’s quasi-omnipotent Dr. Solar, Man of the Atom in 1962 in part for that reason, and my interest waned when he put on red spandex in his fifth issue.

I breathed another small sigh of regret when, in Strange Adventures 190 (July 1966), Baker put on his super suit. I didn’t read him much after that. In part it was because with the Batman craze in full swing, we had an embarrassment of superheroic riches.  Just as we have today.

Strange Adventures: When Turtles Attack!

Thanks to The Mad Artist for the image scans of Strange Adventures 118

In their DC science fiction anthology title Strange Adventures, editor Julius Schwartz and his staff demonstrated an understanding of the dreamlike quality of the childhood mind.

As an example, let’s take issue 118, appearing on newsstands early in 1960 and cover-featuring the tale The Turtle Men from Space by writer Gardner Fox and artist Mike Sekowsky.

Boys in 1960 often had pet turtles in little plastic water dishes that sported a plastic palm tree, and even more frequently owned green plastic “army men” (sold in bulk for as little as a penny apiece in clear plastic bags during the decade, before the Vietnam war eroded their popularity).

Massage those interests a while in your subconscious, and you might come up with the idea that turtles are armored, and military tanks are armored, so…

In that issue, you also got the stories Threat of the Planet Wrecker and The Indestructible Menace and a full page ad for the first issue of a new comic called Green Lantern. A Spotlight on Science feature answered questions about whales and water pressure, how to test water for hardness and the phases of the moon. This was back before Americans began to regard verified, factual knowledge as a threat. You got your dime’s worth.

When Dinosaurs Fly Through a Hole in the Sky

When I was a boy in the early 1960s, my heart belonged to the superheroes. But my favorite title outside that genre was probably editor Julius Schwartz’s Strange Adventures, then its heyday at DC.

The menaces were outsized and outré, but the attitude was a sunlit can-do American optimism, brotherhood of man stuff. The clean lines and lyrical stylization of the art by Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane, Sid Greene and Murphy Anderson reinforced that unshadowed atmosphere. Even a post-nuclear war dystopia like the Atomic Knights series seemed to have its cheery aspects, such as friendly giant riding Dalmatians. And for a small child, that was reassuring.

The title really hit its stride from about 1957 through 1963. Perhaps coincidentally, its optimism seemed to end at about the same time America’s did — on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.

My favorite issue, No. 121, had arrived on the newsstand earlier, cover-dated October 1960. The stories by Gardner Fox — The Wand That Could Work Miracles, a “Space Museum” tale called The Billion-Year Old Spaceship and Invasion of the Flying Reptiles — all offered science fictional wish fulfillment.

A hole opens in time and releases invulnerable pteranodans from a hundred million years ago over Washington, DC. Yikes. But luckily, a plucky husband-and-wife team of scuba-diving scientists, Jim and Rhoda Trent, have found a plesiosaur frozen in ice (Schwartz’s titles were always resolutely feminist, their female characters smart, stylish, cool-headed and brave). Befriending the revived dinosaur, whom they nickname Ol’ Pleasure, the Trents — by offering themselves as bait on water skis — are able to use the plesiosaur to defeat the pteranondans. My favorite part was the last panel, with the Trents happily tossing fish to their plesiosaur pal at a seaquarium.

The story was probably popular, because the Trents returned to help giant undersea frog people in Strange Adventures 130. And the cover idea — flying dinosaurs coming through a hole in a sky — was recycled for Green Lantern 30, cover-dated July 1964. 

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).