Number 1403: Other Earths

Bram Hilton zips along through space at one million light years per second in his intergalactic bell jar. I assume he needs to go that fast because the bell jar is small with no refrigerator, microwave oven, wet bar or toilet, and he probably needs a lot of rest stops. What he's looking for with a “vibration-duplicator” guiding him are other Earths that are like our planet, just in different phases of time. He ends up in Troy and at the Lincoln assassination. Pretty good timing for taking vibration-duplicator potluck!

Murphy Anderson drew this story for Strange Adventures #10 (1951), and the writing is credited on the splash page to Manly Wade Wellman. Wellman wrote science fiction and fantasy for several decades, and I have read many of his stories and books. I don’t recall any of his prose fiction being as oddball as this comic book story, and I attribute that to editor Julius Schwartz handing him a plot to work from, and having Wellman do his best to make sense of it.

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Number 1109


Heroes out of time


Consider this to be another story anti-comic book crusader Dr. Fredric Wertham might have trouble with, if he ever saw it. As I showed you in Pappy's #1039. Dr. Wertham was unduly exercised over Superboy going through time and interacting with historical figures. In "Heroes Out of Time," published in Mystery In Space #3 (1951), the historical figures are brought forward in time to combat a menace. Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon help defeat Dr. Indigo Maylor and his army of giant carrots. Besides misrepresenting real people in a comic book plot, maybe Wertham would also have a problem with walking carrots. (They remind me of Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot comics.)

Franklin and Napoleon were real people, Maylor is—to the best of my knowledge—not. "The last American hanged for black magic" is someone I couldn't find after exhaustive research (OK, I admit; I googled the name and didn't find an historical person.)

I love the first part of the story. The characters are lovers, fellow scientists working on two separate projects next door to each other. The man just can't get his experiment on plants to work, but his scientist girlfriend just happens to have invented a time machine to bring people from the past to help! Uh, fella...drop your stupid carrot project and get on board your squeeze's time machine thing. There's a lot of potential there.

The name of author Robert Starr is a pseudonym of Manly Wade Wellman. The artwork is by Bob Oksner and Bernard Sachs.

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