[3] Comer's circle of friends and colleagues included other notable explorers of the time, such as Robert Peary and Capt.

[5][9][10] Comer made the first of his Arctic voyages at age 17 on the whaler Nile bound for Cumberland Sound, Baffin Island in 1875.

[5] From 1895 to 1912, Comer was the master on six whaling cruises to the Hudson Bay, including wintering in Roes Welcome Sound,[6] on the Era (wrecked off Newfoundland in 1906) (Eber, 1989, pp.

[11] While wintering in the Hudson Bay, Comer became acquainted with and concerned for the Aivilingmiut, Netsilingmiut, and Kivallirmiut (also known as Qaernermiut or Caribou Inuit.

The Inuit women made caribou clothing for Comer's men, vital for survival through Arctic winters.

[16] Comer fathered at least one other child while in Hudson Bay with an Inuk woman named Ooktok, Laurent Pameolik (1911–?).

[18] His 1907 Anthony Fiala expedition was chartered to establish supply bases in the Arctic in preparation for a second team who would attempt to the reach the North Pole.

[8] In 1915, Comer served as ice master on the George B. Cluett, chartered by the American Museum of Natural History to bring back Donald MacMillan's men from the Crocker Land Expedition at Etah, in northern Greenland.

En route, the Cluett became ice trapped for two years, giving Comer opportunity to perform archaeological excavations at Mount Dundas (Umánaq, Uummannaq or Umanak),[21] a hill near Pituffik, where he unearthed evidence of what is now referred to as the Thule people, ancestors of the Inuit.

Comer is noted as having written the first account of the island's endemic flightless moorhen, the species Gallinula comeri, named after him.

[26]Comer was highly regarded for his Arctic anthropology, ethnology, natural history, geography, and cartography work.

[13] Comer published papers in 1910 and 1913 in the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society of New York providing improved maps and charts of Southampton Island.

[5] Frozen in the ice at Cape Fullerton during the winters of 1910–1912, he made phonograph records of local Inuit, and preserved Adelaide Peninsula's Iluilirmiut folklore and legends.

The Canadian Museum of Civilization bought a large collection of Comer's artifacts in 1913, including a group of animal ivories (fox, musk ox, narwhal, polar bear, wolf), most of which, if not all, were created by "Harry" Ippaktuq Tasseok (or Teseuke), Chief of the Aivilingmiut,[28] and Comer's chief Inuit shipmate while wintering at Cape Fullerton.