MAN OUT OF TIME
In Cap’s absence, the periodic mutant—some plausible, most silly—popped up in later DC comics (such as Batman #165, Challengers of the Unknown #43, Aquaman #23 and 38, Doom Patrol #115 and 116, and Superman #248 and 265), with reprints of old Captain Comet tales interspersed among them (in 1968’s Justice League of America #60 and 1971’s Superman #244 and World’s Finest #204). It took Marvel’s X-Men in 1963 to cement in readers’ minds the notion of someone being born a mutant. A year after the latter were revitalized in Giant-Size X-Men #1, their DC counterpart staged his own return (neatly sandwiched between reprints in DC Super-Stars #4 and 6). Like Captain America and then-recent DC revival Captain Marvel, Adam Blake was a man out of time, having left Earth twenty years earlier. “He was so far beyond mankind intellectually,” it was explained, “he felt lost on our world and so he went starward, seeking his destiny and ultimately, himself.” Whether or not he succeeded, Cap returned to Earth in 1976, discovering his mid-1950s fashions were no longer in style and that there was now a plethora of costumed heroes and villains to contend with. The hook in Secret Society of Super-Villains #2 (July–Aug. 1976, co-written by Gerry Conway and David Anthony Kraft) was that Comet didn’t know which was which and he unwittingly helped two SSOSV members defeat Green Lantern. (If it seems odd that Cap had never heard of the Green Lantern Corps, recall what Douglas Adams once said: “Space is big.”) The Society, augmented by Gorilla Grodd’s telepathic shielding, imagined they had a prize dupe in Captain Comet. The hero’s own mental abilities soundly trumped the super-gorilla’s, though, and he played them before shifting from double-agent to implacable foe in issue #5.
© 2008 Marvel Characters, Inc.
The Golden and Silver Ages of DC Mutants Two of DC’s other little-known mutants: Evart Keenan, from All-Flash #11 (July–Aug. 1943), and Governor Andrew Warner, who mutated into “The Man Who Quit the Human Race!” in Batman #165 (Aug. 1964). TM & © DC Comics.
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“I felt—rightly or wrongly—that the readers needed an heroic rooting interest in a book that otherwise would have focused exclusively on the bad guys,” Gerry Conway explains. “In retrospect it might have been fun, and an interesting departure, to see things entirely from the villains’ point of view, but in 1976 that wasn’t really an option. (I’d like to think I’d do it differently today.) I chose Captain Comet as the resident good guy because he didn’t have any other attachments in the DC Universe, and theoretically that meant I could develop the character however I wanted. I had a pretty extensive collection of Strange Adventures at the time, so I was pretty familiar with the character as he’d appeared before.” For drama’s sake, Cap’s powers were reduced from 1950s heights that included extraordinary strength, stamina, invulnerability, intangibility, and adaptation to any physical threat thrown at him. With just one-tenth of Superman-level strength, Comet’s telepathy and telekinesis, at least, remained at the forefront of his abilities. Still, he now had one power never evidenced in his original series: Cap could fly, leaving a trademark comet trail in his wake! His Cometeer rocketship remained for long-range space travel, but he could now throw a bubble of air around himself to breathe in the vacuum. Visually, Comet’s costume was tweaked as well, including the addition of a comet icon to his chest. “We wanted to update it to the current style of superhero costume design (getting rid of the suspenders in particular, and giving him some kind of chest symbol),” Conway recalls. “I don’t recall who did the actual design. At that time I often drew primitive sketches for new characters myself, so I might have done it. But I’m guessing it was probably Al Milgrom; he and I worked on quite a few projects together during that period.”