Featuring: Captain Atom
Release: January 1960
Cover: March 1960
10 cents
9 pages
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| INTERLUDE | Captain Atom #78 | |
| Amazing Spider-Man #33 | Reading order | Tales of Suspense #72, Story B |
Meet Captain Adam… the Air Force career man who knew more about rocketry, missiles, and the universe than any man alive… a specialist of the missle age, a trained, dedicated soldier who was a physics prodigy at eight, a chemist, a ballistics genius! In short, Captain Adam was an invaluable space-age soldier even before that memorable day at Cape Canaveral, Florida, when an Atlas missile was being readied for blast-off… with an atomic warhead inside… and Captain Adam making the final last second adjustments!
GCD credits the story to Joe Gill and the art to Steve Ditko. They say Ditko’s signature appears, but I can’t prove that. Maybe someone has better eyes than I do. UPDATE: My readers do have better eyes than I!
I’m curious what happens to Steve Ditko after he leaves Marvel. And the answer can be found before he even leaves Marvel. About 6 months before his last Spider-Man and Dr. Strange story appear, his work starts showing up from other publishers. The first work to grace newsstands is a return to his character, Captain Atom, published almost concurrently with Amazing Spider-Man #32, part of the story that reads like Ditko’s last Spider-Man story.
I thought it would be good to check out that story, but for context I thought it would be worth first going back to the creation of the character, which came out over 2 years before the first Spider-Man story.
We’ll retroactively place this in the reading order alongside the comics concurrent to Captain Atom’s return.
Before Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, Steve Ditko teamed with writer Joe Gill to create Captain Atom. Let’s check out his first adventure from 1960.
Continue reading “PRELUDE: Space Adventures #33, Story B”