CAPTAIN NUCLEAR MIDNIGHT!

I first read about Captain Midnight in Jim Steranko’s The Steranko History of Comics, where it was revealed to me that in a team-up between the Captain and Spy Smasher, Captain Midnight got the better end of the deal. But for decades, I was unable to learn more about the character. As the years passed, I discovered the radio show on vinyl albums, comics, then the Dark Horse comic series, but at the time there was little to quench the thirst of my curiosity.

A bit later, I read Richard Lupoff’s classic history of the comics, All in Color for a Dime, which had a nice chapter about Captain Midnight and the numerous comic/radio show spinoffs of the era, but still offered none of what I wanted, which was the stories. So, still in my youth, I held out for one hope. Lupoff’s book had mentioned that there was a Captain Midnight TV series, and if I was up late enough, it might come on TV in reruns sometime.

It never happened, and I forgot all about it, until years later when YouTube appeared on this thing we didn’t used to have called “the net.” So, one day, I see Captain Midnight in my feed, and I was pumped.

“After all these years! Finally, here it is, Captain Midnight! Oh, what sort of horrible world did we live in where these adventures had been kept from me? Seriously, I had been looking out for forty years, and had never seen an adventure. Why, oh why, had they had they kept me away from Captain Midnight? Surely, there was nothing there that could be bad for a boy, why would parents and teachers try to keep my away from Captain Midnight?" 

Then I saw this episode:

Even by the seventies we knew nuclear waste was bad.

And, yes, I think if we had come home to watch our heroes standing in nuclear fallout, we might have freaked out a little.