Long before the whiny, angst-ridden X-men of Marvel Comics fame, there was Adam Blake. A son born to a kindly midwestern couple, John and Martha Ke....oops, Blake. When he was being birthed a comet flashed above (could it have been the baby Superman's spacecraft???) and triggered a genetic change in the baby's mind. As he grew up, he discovered he could just know where to find any lost item, read entire encyclopedias and memorize them word-for-word, play every instrument in a band without ever knowing the song, and perform every single sport beyond Olympic capabilities. With all these abilities he felt...different; and as he grew up he logically fell into the librarian field. It wasn't until he was hanging out with and gaining the guidance of some older physicist, Dr. Zackro that he discovered the truth about himself... and just in time, because some criminals had a beef with the professor! After defeating them with his amazing powers of the future, he decided to become a hero when pretty much the rest of the DC Universe was quitting.
This age of comic books was the awkward stage for super-heroes. The Golden Age of heroes was over and being taken over by other story genres. The Silver Age of super-heroes wouldn't be in full force until the end of the decade. Some have called this the "Atomic Age," a time of few new heroes. Captain Comet was pretty much sitting alone at the junior-high lunch-table of comic book characters!
"Devil's Island in Space!" takes place a bit later after his first appearance, in Strange Adventures #28 (January 1953), and fittingly to the zeitgeist of the age relies heavily on the use of the H-bomb in the plot. The story is beautifully rendered by master artist Murphy Anderson!
Creeeeeepy! Those alien creatures look like invisible sexual predators, all horned up after a sitting in their communist, alien sauna! Watch out, Captain Comet!
The story starts off with a the US military about to happily test the crap out of some H-bomb on some dumb Pacific island.
We find out those perverted-looking aliens were actually prisoners sent from another planet to live out their sentences here on Earth, in a bunch of caves. Man-caves. Anyway, what do these aliens do with their time? Create an invisibility mechanism out of cave rocks so they can secretly lurk about in lockerrooms across the world.
And to use their keen alien intellect to walk about and carry an H-bomb away by hand.
Captain Comet uses his keen mind of far future:
So he captures the alien creeps and delivers them back to their home planet.
Hey, Planet of Labia! We don't want you dumping your sexual offenders and criminals on our beautiful Earth. We love our planet! We want it safe, so we may blast it away island by island with our H-bombs!!! Yay, Captain Comet, the man whose mind has the same half-life as uranium!
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