Russia might have been ahead in the space race, but America stood ready to redress the balance with a superman.
In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans they must “…comprehend (the) grave implications” of something he called the “military-industrial complex.”
As well he might. After all, by that time the American military-industrial complex already had its own comic-book Superman, debuting on American newsstands exactly a year before Ike’s speech. And Eisenhower, his balding head discreetly turned, had even been a character in that feature.
Captain Atom, artist Steve Ditko’s first superhero, debuted in Charlton Comics’ Space Adventures 33 (March 1960), in a Cold War story penned by Joe Gill and capped by Eisenhower’s cameo.
“I have studied the reports on you with great interest!” the president told the Air Force’s Captain Adam. “You, more than any other weapon, will serve as a deterrent of war! They must not learn about you!”
To that end, Ike gave Captain Adam his radiation-neutralizing costume and a code name, “Captain Atom” (I must say, they might have tried just a tad harder to conceal his identity).
“Captain Adam was an officer in the pre-Vietnam U.S. Air Force, stationed at Cape Canaveral, when he had one of those comic book accidents that would disintegrate an actual human, and — surprise — was disintegrated,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “Where he departed from reality was in being able to pull himself back together; and when he did, he found he had wonderful and very useful superpowers. Thereafter, he served his country both as a military man during the height of the Cold War — and as Captain Atom.”
“By over a year, he preceded a foursome whose rocket ride through a cosmic radiation storm transformed them into Marvel’s early flag bearers,” noted Howard P. Siegel in Rocket’s Blast Comicollector. “So too did Dell, some five years later, follow almost the exact same pattern in creating Nukla, whose demise into atomic transcription was due to communist ground-to-air missiles launched at his U-2 spy ship.”
Then 20 years into his existence, Superman’s super-feats had become pretty perfunctory when they weren’t simply bizarre (remember that time he mopped up a giant molasses spill with his hair?) But Ditko gave verve and elegance, grace, and speed to displays of Captain Atom’s powers, even underlining them with a bright, glowing contrail.
And as an Air Force officer, Captain Atom was the perfect Pentagon poster-boy superhero for the postwar military-industrial complex.
A different kind of “superpower” had appeared in the Cold War. When the U.S. abruptly ended World War II by developing and detonating the atomic bomb, it became the world’s sole superpower — briefly, before Russia stole the atomic bomb’s secrets.
And then on Oct. 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched something the Russians called “Traveler” (“Sputnik” in Russian), the world’s first artificial satellite. Soviet superiority in space science came as an ugly shock to Americans, who saw themselves falling behind on the new frontier of the 20th century.
America’s satellite anxieties were reflected in the story Captain Atom on Planet X (Space Adventures 36, Oct. 1960) when the good captain guarded a new American surveillance satellite from enemy missiles.
Earlier, oddly enough, Captain Atom had managed to rescue a cosmonaut in space even before the Russians had any.
“It was the dream of scientists of every government to send a man-carrying rocket out into nowhere, then to bring him back!” began the story The Second Man in Space (Space Adventures 34, June 1960). “Our missile teams were still months away when the announcement came from behind the Iron Curtain … mission accomplished! Their man was out there, hurtling around Earth at 23,000 mph!”
That’s exactly what did happen — 10 months later. That’s when the 27-year-old cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit Earth, traveling in the Vostok space capsule.
So, were Gill and Ditko prescient? Not really. The idea of the Soviets leaving the atmosphere pervaded that same atmosphere back then.
In 1959, the Soviet space program launched Luna 2, the first probe to hit the moon. And “lost cosmonaut” stories were already circulating.
“In early 1958, word reached America from the Soviet Union of a manned suborbital flight that hit a peak altitude of 186 miles,” Discover Magazine noted. “The story turned out to be fake and part of a radio broadcast, tricking listeners much like the infamous broadcast of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. Adding to the believability was a comment from Austrian rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth — by then living in the United States — referencing a pilot killed on a suborbital flight. The flight, if it was real, wasn’t a space shot. It could have been a high-altitude aircraft flight. Nevertheless, the seed for the idea of a secret Soviet launch had been planted.”
“Lost cosmonaut stories gained traction in 1959 when America met its Mercury astronauts and started looking for evidence of an equivalent program from its Soviet rivals. Details were few and far between, coming via hearsay at industry events and in casual conversations at cocktail parties, but a sketchy picture began to emerge,” Discover noted. “Soviet news managers were partly responsible for spreading stories of lost cosmonauts with evasive, boastful, and often distorted presentations of fact that created the mysterious and secretive atmosphere.”
So American audiences were primed for stories about the Soviet space program’s lauded triumphs and secret failures when Captain Atom rescued The Second Man in Space.
Launching himself “past Explorer I … past the Sputniks,” the superhero senses the body heat of a dying, comatose cosmonaut, and races back to Earth to obtain a new American drug designed to counter the damage caused by take-off acceleration.
Phasing himself through the space capsule’s walls, Captain Atom saves the cosmonaut with an injection and flies him home — only to find he may have done too good a job.
“Once more we have shamed the West with our fantastic deeds!” a Russian general boasts to TV cameras as the superhero watches invisibly and helplessly. “We sent the first man into space and brought him back!”
But the new Russian national hero, Igor, contradicts the general, explaining that he was saved by some American who was the true first man in space. American compassion is vindicated, and Russian ruthlessness is vilified. The Charlton story was a preemptive propaganda strike in fiction at the Soviets’ eventual victory in reality.
Captain Atom’s Charlton adventures never really explored the impact such a being might have on the balance of powers, but that topic went front and center in 1986 when Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ dystopian Watchmen turned Captain Atom into Doctor Manhattan.
About Author
