Captain Comet
77 years ago - Professor Emery Zackro invents new experimental spaceflight technology. It is tested by astronauts John Blake & Elizabeth Chase. They observe the Dionysus Comet on its return trajectory. Their son, Adam Blake, is conceived in space, unknowingly bathed in the strange radiation of the comet.
73 years ago - 4-year-old Adam Blake displays remarkable observational and cognitive capabilities.
69 years ago - 8-year-old Adam Blake is taken from normal school, his superhuman ability to retain and understand all information ostracizing him from his peers. He begins attending Cambridge.
63 years ago - 14-year-old Adam Blake, having never touched a piano before, performs Charles Valentin Alkan's Concerto for Solo Piano, one of the most technically difficult piano pieces ever written. He begins hiding his abilities, as he feels less and less in common with the rest of humanity.
60 years ago - 17-year-old Adam Blake's physical body continues to develop even after reaching physical maturity. He develops near-invulnerability, superhumanly inexhaustible stamina, and his aging begins to slow.
58 years ago - 19-year-old Adam Blake's telekinetic & telepathic powers begin to develop. He saves the life of his fellow student, Betty, but has no capacity to connect with her afterward. He begins testing his own limits, theorizing that he is experiencing advanced, accelerated human evolution.
53 years ago - 24-year-old , working as an unsuspecting lab assistant, discovers the pending invasion of Earth by the Astur. Updating the spaceflight technology of Professor Emery Zackro, He constructs a new space-capable vehicle, the Cometeer, and flies into space to confront the Astur, using the name Captain Comet. He continues to protect the solar system, but hides his identity and his mutant nature from the public.
40 years ago - 34-year-old Adam Blake meets Abin Sur, the Green Lantern of sector 2814. He begins to regularly travel outside our solar system, becoming a hero across the galaxy.
15 years ago - 62-year-old Adam Blake encounters the Omega Men, and attempts to capture them as escaped criminals. Cornered on Lythtyl, Vril Dox outsmarts Blake, pitting him against Gordanian shock troops, revealing the regime they are fighting. Blake agrees to become a probationary member of the Omega Men.
11 years ago - 66-year-old Adam Blake and the Omega Men defeat Calculators of Colu, and the Omega Men are phased out. Adam fights the Starbreaker. Heavily injured and knowing the Starbreaker is on its way to Earth, he returns to his home planet, warning the Justice League and Adam Strange. Discovering just how uncomfortable interactions with normal humans have become, he stays on the League Satellite to recover.
10 years ago - 67-year-old Adam Blake returns to his life in deep space, serving as hero in all corners of the galaxy.
3 years ago - 74-year-old Adam Blake is magically summoned to Earth by Kent Nelson, to assist him alongside Arthur Curry, Kendra Saunders & Solomon Grundy in ending a cosmic demonic cataclysm. In the end, Grundy gives his life to save the universe.
2 years ago - 75-year-old Adam Blake investigates Hardcore Station & the disappearance of former Omega Men Ferrin Colos, The Durlan, & Ti'julk Mr'asz he discovers that they were attacked by the forces of are attacked by the forces of Lady Styx. When he is captured & tortured, he jettisons his core consciousness & generates a new, younger body with altered powers, and is brought to safety by Ti'julk. He begins hunting for his own original body.
now - 77-year-old Adam Blake discovers that Lady Styx's forces have been growing brainwashed clone telepaths from his original body. He joins Adam Strange's new Omega Men to stop her.
You'd be forgiven for not knowing who Captain Comet is... he has never really completely found his footing as a mainstay character in DC's lexicon, despite several near-brushes with mainstream status. At best he's sort of a walking Easter Egg; a hidden gem of historic significance. At the same time, however, he's also a fantastic example of the evolving nature of superheroes across several eras, and as a result he's an incredibly fun character to dive into. Hopefully we can do the cool history of this character justice!
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Captain Comet's Comic HistoryCaptain Comet first appeared at an interesting time for comics. In 1951, The Golden Age popularity of superhero comics was largely done, and we were a long way from the start of the Silver Age. This period is often referred to as the 'Atomic Age' of comics, largely because of characters like Captain Comet, which debuted in Strange Adventures #9, a creation of legendary creators John Broome, Carmine Infantino & Julius Schwartz. He was a deliberate attempt to revitalize interest in superheroes, while still flavored like the sci-fi serial characters of his era. You can really FEEL the Silver Age DNA in him.... Like this is a trial run on the storytelling stylings these creators will deploy over the next decade as they define the future of comics.
Interestingly, Adam Blake's origin specifically describes him as a mutant, and in fact he might actually be the very first mutant in comics, with a certain team book still 12 years off. Adam was described as an evolutionary leap for humanity, a man born 100,000 years before his time. This fits right into the sci-fi stories of the era; a man from the future being born today, sort of inverted Buck Rogers. He gets a spaceship and a scientist buddy, and had all sorts of great 50s-era sci-fi adventures, appearing for a full 37 issues, often as the cover feature. He stopped appearing in '54, still a few years before the start of the Silver Age, when fellow throwback hero and Strange Adventures album Adam Strange would pick up the torch. |
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Captain Comet returned in 1975 in the series Secret Society of Super-Villains, He's introduced as a man out of time, having been away from Earth for 20 years (which is accurate). He appears for 12 issues total and interacts with several Justice League members and even gets a Justice League communicator, but his only actual appearance in the pages of Justice League is in issue #157, as a face in the crowd at Ray Palmer & Jean Loring's wedding. I am given to understand that shortly afterward, in a poll to add new members to the League, Captain Comet actually came in second after Zatanna.
Adam's next big return came in 1990, when he became a regularly appearing part of the series L.E.G.I.O.N. he actually makes more appearances here then in any other comic, and would go on to appear in several spinoff series from this book, as well as becoming a major part of DC's pantheon of cosmic characters in the 2000s when he was included in the 2005 Infinite Crisis lead-in series Raan/Thanagar War, starred in his very own subsequent miniseries Mysteries in Space, and then just went on to continually appear in a broad spectrum of Cosmic stories running right up until the 2011 continuity reboot. Versions of the character have appeared in the New 52 era... but if they weren't going out of their way to call those characters Captain Comet, you'd never recognize them. |
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Our Captain Comet StoryMy big introduction to Captain Comet was in the 2006 Mystery in Space miniseries by Jim Starlin, the absolute king of cosmic storytelling in comics. It was full of big bombastic superhero space opera energy and absolutely killer art. This story is absolutely where we wanted to start building our version of Captain Comet, setting him up as part of the new ongoing space adventures of the new Omega Men as they prepare to go up against the intergalactic forces of Lady Styx.
That's where we started, anyway, but the more you go back and read the classic adventures of Captain Comet the more you discover just what a unique linchpin in the history of comics in general and DC comics in particular he is. We really wanted to capture that feeling of him being an extremely early proto-hero, so we're making him the very first superhero we're creating who operates in the much earlier part of our sliding timeline, predating almost the entire thing. We'll likely make more characters active in this era down the line, but it's fitting that Adam is the first. Captain Comet feels like such a fascinating time capsule of a character, but he's also occasionally stepped out of his own shadow and become a really dynamic character in his own right. The real fun here is to take this character with so much depth in the history of DC and fund exciting new things to do with him in the modern day. |
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