Comic books rarely use a good idea only once.
For example, take Charlton’s Space War 10 (April 1961). In the story, The Comeback, drawn by Steve Ditko, a rather dim fellow named Marvin Baird wanders onto a hydrogen bomb testing ground in New Mexico and is vaporized.
“We won’t even find a fingernail to put in a grave,” laments one of the military officers.
Propelled with the nuclear cloud a hundred miles into space, Marvin doesn’t question the fact that he has inexplicably re-formed as a sort of energy ghost that is “…not quite real … not flesh and blood as we of Earth understand the terms.
“Wow! Wotta big blast that was!” Marvin thinks. “I’ve got a king-sized headache!”
Phasing through the side of an alien spacecraft, Marvin discovers hollow-eyed, Munch-mouthed extraterrestrials who have blue-gray skin, and who can see him even though he seems to be invisible.
“You are of Earth?” one asks.
“I was, friend,” he replies. “I’m of nothing much right now!”
Intent on attacking Earth, the aliens try to destroy Marvin, but can’t touch him with their arms or their rays.
While the aliens plan to turn their deadly rays on Earth, Marvin zooms back home to the testing site for a new “Nike-Argos anti-missile missile.”
Unseen by the Air Force personnel there, he launches the missile, which destroys the spacecraft.
Marvin smirks invisibly while the military crew wonders what happened.
We never learn whatever became of Marvin Baird, but his fate didn’t seem to worry him.
“The way he looked at things, the worst had happened,” the text tells us. “Nothing could hurt him now!”
One thing jumps out at you in rereading this story — Marvin is a comic take on Captain Atom, even drawn by the same artist.
His origin is precisely the same, and his powers seem to be as well. Captain Atom, too, could become invisible, travel at supersonic speed, and phase through objects. The major difference was that Allen Adam was a good deal smarter than Marvin Baird.
Space War 10 showed up on newsstands in February 1961, alongside the seventh appearance of Captain Atom in Space Adventures 39. The good Captain had debuted one year and one month before.
This storyline is a good illustration of how comic books can filter reality, reflecting its distorted image like a carnival mirror. During this era, human civilization stood on the brink of nuclear destruction. It appeared to be mere minutes away when I was 8, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
But four-color fantasy inverted all that, defanging our fears. Being at ground zero in a hydrogen bomb detonation might not obliterate you after all. Why, instead of disintegrating you, it just might re-integrate you into some new kind of being, a super self.
“Culture could give children heroes to whom atomic explosions were as mosquito bites, and to whom radiation was as sunlight, but what could it provide by way of comfort for older audiences?” wondered William W. Savage Jr. in his book Comic Books and America: 1954-1954. “There were some questions asked by comic books — difficult questions about the cost of our Bomb to the Japanese, for example — but they were infrequent, because, on the whole, American culture simply refused to make the Bomb an unhappy, unpleasant, or unappealing thing.”
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