Children tend to anthropomorphize their world, projecting human characteristics onto animals, cars, trains, and even natural phenomena.
“As Piaget has shown, the child’s thinking remains animistic until the onset of puberty,” wrote Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. “His parents and teachers tell him that things cannot feel and act; and as much as he may pretend to believe this to please these adults, or not to be ridiculed, deep down the child knows better… The sun, the stone, and the water are believed to be inhabited by spirits very much like people.”
“Subjected to the rational teachings of others, the child only buries his ‘true knowledge’ deeper in his soul and it remains untouched by rationality; but it can be formed and informed by what fairy tales have to say.”
And what comic books have to say.
The Julius Schwartz-edited titles at DC Comics made good use of that childhood trait by investing various inanimate phenomena with sentience. Over at what would become Marvel, they were busy creating rock monsters, water monsters, fire monsters, and so forth. And DC had a taste for cloud monsters.
In The Flash 111 (Feb.-March 1960), writer John Broome and artists Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson gave us The Invasion of the Cloud Creatures! When Dr. Wiley Summers warns that malevolent cloud creatures are emerging from volcanoes, he’s laughed at until they start attacking U.S. Air Force bases. The Flash learns to destroy them by skipping from cloud to cloud like a stone on water, and American citizens learn for the umpteenth time that it’s unwise to ignore the warnings of scientists.
Then, in Mystery In Space 81 (Feb. 1963), writer Gardner Fox and artists Infantino and Anderson gives us The Cloud-Creature That Menaced Two Worlds! In a convoluted plot, Adam Strange thwarts a thousand-year-old Rann despot, Alva Xar, while encountering a conjured duplicate of his fiancé Alanna, a mind-over-matter device called a cyberay and a cloud monster over Tasmania.
Because he’s holding the device, Adam discovers he can simply will the attacking cloud creature to vanish — another metaphor winking at the fairy tale power of childhood imagination.
Adam Strange had another anthropomorphized weather phenomenon for a recurring archenemy — the sentient whirlwinds called the Dust Devils.
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