“Yesterday’s” Comic> Space Adventures #40

More Captain Atom I can handle. It’s more Space Adventures that bothers me.

Space Adventures Vol. 3 #40

Charlton Comics Group (June, 1961)

The sooner we get through this series the better. I’ve already read some issues of Captain Atom while reviewing Ted Kord’s run as the Blue Beetle before he got his own solo comic. With more time it’s possible the Captain Atom stories improved, but these are still written like an anthology, and the stories have not been good. The one non-Captain Atom story in the past few issues were boring and I’m guessing that’s the norm. I won’t be coming back to this series once we’re done, and I’d stop now if there weren’t so few with the good captain left.

Enough intro padding. On to the reviews.

[Read along with me here]

“The Circus” by Steve Ditko

The first Captain Atom adventure of the issue. The bad guys wants to force the US ambassador to tell the UN what they want him to say, but Captain Atom prepared for this and impersonated the ambassador. After that was fixed he went to destroy a bunch of missiles the enemy was going to use to blackmail the world. This is a story that had some okay ideas but should have been two separate stories and given more time to really show off a threat.

“The Friendly Planet”

A bit too friendly. The people of Imo, constantly referred to as “mimes” if mimes were all green wookies, are so happy to see the Earth delegation that they all turn into the ship’s captain because they hate their own shapeless forms. The captain has to convince them to all be different people, but they can only imitate specific humans. Which a few lonely crewmen take as an opportunity to bring girls to them, sort of. I don’t know what message this story was planning but doesn’t deliver it well.

“The Stolen Hero”

From the title I thought this was going to be another Captain Atom adventure, but it’s another supposed future adventure disconnected from all the others. It’s the far off future of 1995. Thomas Bridewell, a hero so great we won’t get to see any of his less boring adventures, is kidnapped by an enemy who is sure his one ship can conquer this and other universes. However, he is forcing the crew to work for him by holding their families hostage and is planning to use his fire guns on the Earth unless they agree to be conquered by him. Bridewell manages to get the crew on his side by…punching him a few times to prove he survives on methane gas instead of oxygen, so they take him into custody instead. Are we sure AI writing is a new phenomenon? Because this was as badly written as a lot of AI stories we see today.

“The Boy And The Stars”

Captain Atom returns for the thankfully final story of the issue. (Sadly we aren’t done reading the series.) A soldier’s son is sick after getting gamma radiation through his telescope. Yes, this is the inciting incident. The plot is Captain Atom taking him into space to find the “good thing” that will cure him like it did Captain Adam or his hero identity. I’m not sure. It wouldn’t make sense either way. Nothing about this story makes any sense. That’s Space Adventures for you.

overall

That is indeed this comic in a nutshell: a lot of nonsense that rarely has a good story idea, and when it does there isn’t time to properly explore it. There’s one more issue with Captain Atom, but it isn’t the next one, so I don’t have to read it. We’ll jump ahead to the issue after that and see his last appearance in this series before getting his own.