“Yesterday’s” Comic> Space Adventures #36

Nice of the cover to tell you the backstory…instead of this issue’s story!

Space Adventures #36

Charlton Comics Group (October, 1960)

Four stories, but while we only care about Captain Atom in our pre-DC runthrough we’re going to go and read the other three comics anyway. Thus far they’ve involved space but the “adventures” part has been kind of weak, even with the hero we’re here for. Hopefully this issue will be different, partly because we’re getting two stories with Captain Atom this issue.

[Read along with me here]

Captain Atom: The Wreck Of X-44

Someone sabotages the new space plane. Luckily, Captain Adam, alias Captain Atom, was…and this is an actual line of dialog…”completely destroyed in a positive manner” as opposed to being partly destroyed in a negative manner? He manages to rebuild the ship (though overdoes the repairs so they can’t take it apart to check it and now it’s useless…nice move, Nathaniel!), captures the saboteur, and ends this story way too soon. We don’t even know the villain’s motivation. Hopefully his next story will prove more interesting.

The Galactic Souvenir

The last space war took about as long as Captain Atom did to catch the villain. Apparently there were also a lot of them. I’m still not sure if these stories are supposed to take place in the same continuity or not. What matters here is that they conquered the plant people of Flaurian (that’s some attempt to hide the pun without hitting us over the head with it), but their little gift turns out to be an army of giant plant people. Credit to the military and scientists for finding different way to take down their enemy, and we don’t know who was the aggressor or why the war started, so it ends up being a generic story for period sci-fi. Not terrible but not very interesting.

Does Comic Book Plus know one of the pages in the two page text story is upside down?

The Omnipotent Robot

Meet Tondo, the unbeatable robot…until he gets his butt beat on the first planet he is sent to conquer. I won’t spoil the ending in case you go to read this one, but let’s just say, since we’re in the outskirts of DC land, that I didn’t know T.O. Morrow was from outer space. Interesting plot, rather boring in execution as half the story is just showing off space robot Superman.

Captain Atom On Planet X

Sadly he does not fight King Ghidorah in our last story, and our second Captain Atom story. Instead it’s the name of an American spy satellite and Cap has to defend it from the bad guys who want to shoot it down. I know the whole “bargain from a position of strength” thing but we aren’t even sure it was the bad guys. Maybe Australia is just really shy. Another story that’s all plot and no actual story.

overall

I will not be returning to this series once Captain Atom leaves some where in the issue #40s. It’s just not very interesting.