Number 1561: Hidden people

Having had a close relative, now deceased, who “saw” invisible people I can tell you that those hallucinations can be very real to the person having them.

In this story from Strange Adventures #13 (1951), Scott, our main character, sees invisible people after an eye surgery. Really sees them. That’s because in fantasy and science fiction we accept as literal the extraordinary things happening to the characters. Yet when reality touches fiction, people would react to someone seeing invisible people as the extras do here, by assuming the person seeing said invisible aliens from Venus to be mentally ill. And how do we know they aren’t correct — perhaps Scott Fulton is hallucinating, and we are just seeing what he thinks he sees? Well, because this is a comic book, that’s why.

One thing bothers me, though. At the end of the story Scott is married to the invisible girl from Venus. So who conducted the ceremony? “I now pronounce you husband and, errrrr...uh...invisible wife.”

Story written by Edmond Hamilton using the pseudonym Hugh Davidson, pencils by Bob Oksner with inks by Bernard Sachs.

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The Curious Case of the Time Trapper

Faithful readers of the Legion of Superheroes must have been confused at this sequence, which appeared in Adventure #317:

Why confused? Well, it turns out that this was the first mention of the Time Trapper in a Legion story. At the very end of that story (which mostly did not concern TT) came a semi-explanation:

In the next issue, we got our first glimpse of the villain:

Note in particular his physical appearance there. Over the next year or so, we'd see more futile efforts by the Legion to break through:

The Time Trapper turned out to be working behind the scenes in that story, trying to find out the secret of the Legion's super weapon, the concentrator:

But it turns out that he does not have the real secret of the concentrator and flees into the future again. Amazingly, the Time Trapper story would not be resolved until Adventure #338, almost two years after he was first mentioned:

In that story, the Time Trapper has recruited an evil female, Glorith of Baalour, to help him doom the Legion. We get a strong indication of the plot here:

However, when she tries the trick on several members of the Legion, they do not regress in age past babyhood:

Frustrated in his plot to turn the Legion into blobs of protoplasm, he joins Glorith, after first letting Superboy and Brainiac 5 through the Iron Curtain of Time. He leaves them trapped in the future and sets about training the baby Legionnaires to rob for him:

Then he brings them to a planet where elements in the atmosphere will resume their devolution. But this causes problems, too:

But one of the babies has spotted the Time Trapper's ring, which is responsible for keeping Superboy and Brainiac 5 in the future. He switches it off, allowing them to join the group. The Trapper makes a proposal:

Brainiac 5 agrees, but there is a trick:

End of story? Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that it quite literally is the end of the Time Trapper in the Silver Age; he did not appear again outside of a hallucination sequence in Adventure 363. Which, if you think about it, is very odd. Here's this villain whose confrontation with the Legion had been built up over the course of two years, and yet they dispose of him in a single 16-page story? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So I began digging for clues and speculating a bit. The first clue is that initial mention of the Time Trapper in Adventure #317. It appears obvious that there was supposed to be a Time Trapper story which appeared before that, but which was bumped for some reason. And if we look at the cover to Adventure #317, we get a pretty good second clue:

Speculation: Perhaps the Time Trapper story which appeared in Adventure #338 was intended to appear just before #317, but editor Mort Weisinger belatedly realized that this would give him two consecutive stories featuring Legionnaires turning into babies? This fits, especially when you consider that Adventure #338 was written by Jerry Siegel, while #317 was written by Edmund Hamilton. Weisinger could have instructed Hamilton (or artist John Forte) to include a couple panels mentioning the Time Trapper.

There are certainly still some problems with this speculation. For example, the story does not end with the Time Trapper in the future, creating the Iron Curtain of Time. But this objection is easily overcome; Weisinger simply had the ending of the story rewritten because now it took place after the events in #317, instead of before. Note as well that the story in Adventure #338 did not explain what secret the Time Trapper was supposedly concealing from the Legion in the future.

So my best guess is that the Time Trapper story that was supposed to be published before Adventure #317 was in fact the story that ended up being published in Adventure #338, with some changes. Incidentally, the Time Trapper himself may have been based on the Time Master, a similar character that appeared in Wonder Woman #101:

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Number 1013


The Cosmic Secret


Edmond Hamilton, writing here as Hugh Davidson, had a long career in the science fiction, weird tales and comic book field. I believe he wrote mainly, if not all, his comic book stories for DC, under editors Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz. The story, "Secret of the Ages" is a fantasy about living for centuries with an "elixir of youth." It's a variation on the type of story I showed Monday, from The Twilight Zone. In "Secret of the Ages" a scientist, Roger Bacon, predicts the scientific miracles that will come to the human race in time. An acolyte, Alleyn (later Allan) Kent takes the elixir, keeping him young for centuries while he follows scientific progress, keeping the formula for the "greatest secret" from his villainous rival.

The artwork is by comic book journeyman John Giunta, who drew comics from the 1940s through the '60s. He died in 1970; Hamilton died in 1977.

From Mystery In Space #2, 1951:

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Number 906


Smalle world


I like this story from Strange Adventures #4, 1950; it's fairly typical of Julius Schwartz-edited science fiction comics. Edmond Hamilton wrote it, and the title describes it: "The Crime Chase Through Time."

Ed Smalle drew it. He's another comic book journeyman. I haul out guys like Smalle to present to you because after all, these were the guys who were the backbone of the industry. Smalle was one of the early comic book artists, working for the Harry "A" Chesler shop in the 1930s, and continuing in the comics field until the mid-'50s. Information I have on Smalle says he died in 1957.

My favorite is the splash page, with the symbolic climbing from century to century. Schwartz used these types of symbolic splashes occasionally, because of their strong graphic images.

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Number 846

The World Saver comes through again

I'm an old science fiction reader but I shouldn't assume that everyone knows about Edmond Hamilton. He began his writing career in 1926 with a story, "The Monster-God of Mamurth" in Weird Tales, and was one of the most prolific and successful writers of science fiction up until his death in 1977. Hamilton, through his connections with DC editors Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz, wrote many comic book stories, most anonymously.

Hamilton was known amongst science fiction fans variously as World Saver, World Wrecker, Universe Saver, etc., for his plots, which often involved Earth being threatened with total destruction, with a hero saving the whole planet. So it is with "The Comet Peril!" from Mystery In Space #2, 1951, a story that gives Hamilton a byline. (He has another story in the issue, too, under the pen-name Robert Starr.) It's one of the future-in-the-past stories I've mentioned before: stories that were written years before the future date in the story, which we are now reading years after the date has passed. It's pretty obvious our planet didn't get hauled out of orbit by Halley's Comet's in 1986.

Artwork is by Murphy Anderson.

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