Forbidden Worlds #108

The first story presents the usual Silver Age characterization on the fly:

We can get a quick sense of Caton from just those two panels; kind of a wimp and yet it's not really his fault, so we also sympathize with him.  We subsequently learn that he has one particular tormentor: Bat Jennison, and a love object: Celia Jones.  When he grows up, he applies for a job at the local rocket plant:

Okay, so Celia isn't really his type.  Bat decides to pull a prank on him.  He gets several buddies to dress up as generals.  They tell Caton that the astronaut scheduled for the next mission has taken ill, and that they have decided that he must take the rocket jockey's place.  They strap him in and put a firecracker under his seat, knowing this will scare him thoroughly.  It succeeds, so well that Caton is blown out of his seat and lands on the rocket's firing mechanism.

When the rocket finally lands on another planet, Caton discovers that the humans there have patterned their civilization after Earth's medieval period, with knights in armor.  He also learns that he's tremendously strong and has other powers:

And when the princess is threatened:

He wins the heart of the princess, but one thing makes him miserable.  When he returns to Earth, he'll go back to being a weakling.  Fortunately she has a wizard who can take care of that:

And when he gets back on the rocket, he's pleased to discover that the princess has joined him.  When he gets back to Earth, he's a big hero, but Bat still intends to bully him.  Bad idea:

And with a princess won, he has no interest in Celia Jones when she flirts with him.  He even wins first prize in the company costume ball, dressing up as (what else?) a knight in shining armor.

Comments: Cute story.  Writer Richard Hughes did a lot of these types of tales, where the hero takes a trip (often to another planet) and comes back with new confidence and drive.  It's not hard to see the appeal to adolescent boys, who were often subjected to bullying and the scorn of the girls they adored.

The next tale concerns a chemist who works for a tobacco company, trying to come up with a filter that doesn't change the taste of the cigarette.  His latest effort seems to work at first, but soon leaves him feeling dizzy.  He reads the news on the bus home and learns that Ambassador Alvarez was killed and that Pan-Oceanic Oil's stock had soared.  When he gets home, he still feels odd and his wife suggests that he go to bed right after supper:

The next morning, he's eating breakfast with Susan when the radio breaks in with a news bulletin.  Ambassador Alvarez has just been assassinated!  Wait a minute, didn't that happen yesterday?  He hunts around for the newspaper, but can't find it.  He realizes that somehow he tapped into the future, and thinks quickly:

Sure enough, Pan-Oceanic shares climb into the stratosphere, and Arthur sells his shares for over $200,000.  Now there are lots of ways this story could go, but Hughes pulls a big surprise on us:

Comments: A beautiful little story.  Hughes often used a similar plot of someone gaining unexpected riches and then blowing it.  Arthur shows that he deserved his little stroke of good fortune, and has more sense than to try to parlay it into a bigger payday.

The third story is a very shot tale of a sailor who receives a visit from his wife in a dream.  She's concerned about reports of severe weather on the seas.  The next morning, his bunkmate reports that he also saw the woman.  And when he returns home, his wife had had the same dream of visiting him.  What happened?

Comments: These stories are not Hughes' forte, because there isn't room for any real characterization.

The finale is the cover story.  Twin boys were separated at birth due to the divorce of their parents.  One of the twins, Leonard, grows up in America and becomes an unsuccessful painter.  He's told his paintings don't have any effect, and so:

Cue the fella with the horns and a red costume.  Leonard discovers that his new paintings do have an effect; the scenes that he paints come true the next day.  Is he seeing into the future?  No, instead he's changing it, as he soon discovers.  So he gets a great idea:

And sure enough, despite nearly universal scorn for his still life painting, the judges find themselves awarding him the prize.  But he needs new supplies and when he visits his rich uncle, the old man refuses to untrouser the wallet.  Knowing that he's the only heir, Leonard paints again:

Sure enough, the uncle dies in a car wreck.  But Leonard had completely forgotten about his twin brother Henry, who inherits half the estate.  Time for yet another painting:

But by painting the beard out, he blundered, for the man in the painting was himself.  And sure enough, he
falls into an old well the next morning and drowns, much to the delight of Mephisto, who comes to collect his soul.

Comments: Somewhat predictable, but still very entertaining.  It's the flip side of the Arthur tale.  Overall, as usual with ACG comics, I loved this issue.

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Digging for the Gold Watch

Okay, so last night I was reading Forbidden Worlds #81, which includes a very interesting story:

The story has a very simple premise, most of which you can guess from the summary above. Amos is perpetually late (hello, Barry Allen!), but then he buys a gold pocketwatch to make sure he's on time. And suddenly something happens:

The entire world comes to a stop. And so did I, because I immediately recognized this story. It's The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything, a famous novel by John MacDonald, the creator of Travis McGee, and a writer who's probably sold more novels than all but 20 people on the planet.

So I thought, well, it might make an interesting post to talk about how Richard Hughes, who wrote almost all of ACG's stories, copied MacDonald's novel, so I looked up TGTGWAE on Wikipedia. The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything (1962) is a science fiction novel written by John D. MacDonald, considered "a classic screwball mystery".And I frowned, because I already sensed that Forbidden Worlds #81 was earlier than that, and sure enough, it turned out to be the August, 1959 issue.

My god, had one of the most famous writers ever cribbed a story from a comic book? And not just a story, but one according to WP which had 24 printings and been made into not one, but two TV movies? Well, it goes quite a bit deeper than that. The Wikipedia entry notes:

A similar plot line - a man stopping time - already appeared in 1955 in Roger Lee Vernon's story "The Stop Watch", included in the collection "The Space Frontiers". Vernon treated the theme far more seriously, with his protagonist using the device to commit crimes with impunity and win the Third World War all by himself, and finally suffering a terrible perdition.

So I googled Roger Lee Vernon Stop Watch and guess what came up? A blog by the man himself where he had apparently posted the complete contents of The Space Frontiers. As you can see if you scroll down to the table of contents there is no story called The Stop Watch, but there is one called The Time Tablets, about a pharmaceutical chemist who invents a drug which stops time. It's a very, very cool story, and I highly recommend scrolling down and reading it.

 But, at least compared to the Wikipedia entry it is not directly comparable to either All the Time in the World or The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything. Same premise (stoppage of time), but lacking the watch angle. And the whole bit about him stopping WWIII was completely lacking in The Time Tablets.

End of story? Not quite. You see, in my Googling, I learned of another story called All the Time in the World, by Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most famous science fiction authors of all time. Among other stories, he wrote the novels that were turned into the movies of 2001 A Space Oddysey and Fantastic Voyage. And that would be an easy place to close, but I Googled Clarke and All the Time in the World and found out that his story had been turned into an episode of a very early sci-fi TV series called Tales of Tomorrow. Not only that but you could watch that very episode online here.

I really, really recommend you watch that episode; it's 1952 TV, it was apparently performed live (with set changes during commercial breaks) and it's terrific. As you can see, Clarke seems to be the father of all the "stopped time" stories. At least from what I can see, the originator of the watch to stop the clock is Hughes in Forbidden Worlds #81.

What I find more interesting for the purposes of this post is that Hughes' protagonist, Amos Dalrymple, unlike the characters in Clarke, Vernon, or MacDonald, decides to pass on the obvious pecuniary advantages of stopping time, because he is honest:

Instead he tries to make it to his date on time, but when he does he sees a problem:

Worse still, he learns that he cannot save her while time is stopped, because everything is frozen in time. He must do the only thing possible:

He shoves her out of the way of the bus. Thus he does not make a lot of money (although he is given a job by a bank president who had previously declined him a job due to him being late for the interview) but he does get what the characters in the two previous stories do not: the Girl. It's interesting to speculate more on the inspirations for MacDonald's best-seller. From what I can see, Hughes added the crucial element of the watch, which gets mentioned at the end of the ACG story:

But it is very obvious from the title that he was inspired by Clarke's short story. As for Vernon, I simply note two strange elements from his story. 1. At one point the protagonist's girlfriend says that she makes $20,000 a year more than he does. 2. The protagonist mentions that depositing more than $10,000 into a bank account draws the attention of the feds, who suspect drug dealing. Both of those points, despite numerous other markers, make me suspect that the Vernon story was updated for modern audiences from its initial 1950s publication.

Update: J.L. Bell in the comments points to this short story by L. Frank Baum from the early 1900s as an even earlier example of the stopped time plot. Thanks! Update II: Here's an earlier example of a watch used to stop time, from Strange Adventures #50 (November 1954):

Thanks to an anonymous commenter!

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Why I Love American Comics Group

It occurred to me recently while I was reading My Romantic Adventures #115 (Nov-Dec 1960). I've talked a lot about ACG in the past. They were a relatively minor but regular publisher of comics in the Silver and Golden Ages; all told they put out about 1150 comics over the course of about 22 years, or roughly 50 comics a year, four comics a month. Most of their comics were written by their editor, Richard Hughes, under a variety of pseudonyms. Why do I love ACG? It's so simple that I can't believe I never put my finger on it before now. It's because Hughes was a master at creating interesting characters. And when you consider that most of ACG's stories were one-shots, that becomes even more remarkable. Here's the splash page that brought it all home to me:

Now that is a unique character: a female weightlifter who dreams of settling down in smalltown America. That makes for an interesting premise, but Hughes doesn't stop there. He creates a story that fits that character. Our Miss Hercules, Marcia Simms, gets enough money from the sideshow act to buy herself a farm in Carvertown. And it's not long before she attracts the attention of a handsome neighbor:

But as you can probably guess, he is not the right man for her particular character. She's not weak and helpless. Soon after, she introduces herself to another neighbor:

She finds out that Blake had gone to prison for a hit-and-run accident that he claims he didn't commit; in fact, he blames her beau, Otis, for framing him. And to get even, he steals a kiss:

She tells Otis what happens, and while he seems to shrug it off, later that night she hears the sound of raised voices at Blake's farm. Otis and a couple of his buddies intend to beat up Blake. And at last we see why Hughes made her a weightlifter:

Working together, they prove that Otis had indeed framed Blake for the hit-and-run accident, and fall in love.

In that story, Hughes has his protagonist use her singular characterization at the end. But in other stories, it is not uncommon to have the character have to overcome a major trait.  Another romance story from ACG  concerned a gal who's something of a klutz:

In that story, a key moment arrives when the man she loves is trapped on a girder and she must overcome her awkwardness: That, my friends, is superb characterization.

Hughes particularly liked to present us with downtrodden characters who suddenly succeed against all odds.  Americans love the story of an underdog who makes it big. The paragon of this character is obviously Herbie, the "big nothing" to his father who turned out to be one of the most powerful men on Earth.  But there are many other examples in the ACG canon. For example:

The shy, unassuming guy invents a potion that turns him into a strongman:

He becomes famous, and suddenly attractive to women:

But eventually Sally realizes that she liked the old Melvin better, and Melvin remembers that he did it all to impress her:

Want to read about interesting characters?  Check out the ACG line.

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My Romantic Adventures #138

I've said it before and I'll say it again; ACG is the great unknown comic book publisher of the Silver and Golden Age. It's unknown because they (mostly) didn't put out any superhero books. But some fine art, and terrific stories featuring quirky characters put Richard Hughes' mags on the top shelf for me.

This is the final issue of My Romantic Adventures, which lasted a total of fifteen years, from 1949-1964. The opening story is It's Never too Late to Love, and illustrates perfectly why I love the ACG line so much. Meg Foster had grown up plain, unlike her older sister, Dulcy. Dulcy married and moved overseas, where she had a daughter. Meanwhile, Meg started working in a department store as a sales clerk. But she had ideas:

She is soon promoted to head of the department. But when she returns home that evening, she gets bad news. Dulcy and her husband have died in a car crash, and their daughter, Clarice, is coming to live with her. Meg sacrifices herself to make sure that her niece gets everything:

Fortunately the promotions just keep coming for Meg, so she's able to agree when Clarice wants to go to an expensive prep school. But there's still one thing missing in her life, and Meg realizes what it is:

It turns out that Stanley is impressed with Meg's work and her softer side as well, and they begin dating, and become engaged. Clarice comes home for a vacation and Meg realizes that she's developed into a lovely woman. But you can probably see the fly heading towards the ointment here:

Sure enough, Meg comes home from getting fitted for a wedding dress to find:

Clarice insists that she loves Stanley and that they plan to get married, so Meg buries her own dreams and starts to help plan things. But:

And the wedding dress has to be the most expensive and the flowers and the gifts for the bridesmaids, etc. Meg soon realizes that her niece is likely to bankrupt her with the lavish plans. And is she really in love with Stanley, or does she just want him for his money? So she lays a trap:

She plays the recording for her niece, pretending it's coming over the radio. The "news" is that Stanley has been fired from his job over losses in the stock market and is now penniless. Sure enough, Clarice announces haughtily that she's dumping him, until she realizes that the recording was just a trick. But when Meg announces that she's going to fight for Stanley, she claims that he never really loved her and that he thinks of her as an old maid. Just then:

So Meg and Stanley are on again, and Clarice isn't heading back to that exclusive boarding school:

Comments: Wow! What a total beeeyatch Clarice is; Meg should have given her the old heave-ho years ago, although you could argue that she was partly to blame by spoiling her niece as a youngster. Overall a very entertaining story, and the ending is very satisfying due to the terrific characterization of Meg.

The second story is a brief advice bit:

Nothing objectionable in there, and note that it even suggests that the woman stand up for herself; not bad by 1964 standards.

The next story is the cover feature, and it's a weird one. A man and a woman fight over a taxi (a classic plot-starter), but agree to share the ride when the cabbie points out they're both going to Grand Central Station. The cabbie decides to push things forward a bit:

But when he plays some music on the radio, they both reminisce about a romance in their past where they were jilted. Ah, they have something in common! The next stage for the cabbie is to show them that he has a TV they can watch, featuring the story of a man coming home to his wife:

What the heck? That's the end of the story; they never do explain how the couple ended up on the television, or the whole bit with the cab apparently flying around erratically. I can only assume that we're intended to see the cabbie as some sort of magical being who could make anything happen.

The last story is about women who are just begging to be jilted by their boyfriends, taken from the files of a marriage consultant. The first girl is too much of a manager:

The second one is a spendthrift:

The third is a liar, while the fourth continues to flirt with other men after her engagement. The moral of the story?

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Happy Thanksgiving!

I have remarked in the past how secular comics seemed to be in the Silver Age, and this was not exclusive to the Christmas season. Thanksgiving stories also were reduced quite substantially. According to the GCD, there were 16 stories published between 1940 and 1954 with the word "Thanksgiving" in the title, while from 1955-1970, there were only 8 such stories (and one of those was a reprint). I have already remarked on one of those stories, the Atomic Knights tale, Thanksgiving 1990. Here's another, from ACG's Forbidden Worlds #73, which is famous for another reason (which I'll give at the end of the post):

Harry was an ordinary guy with work pressures and not enough money to buy the things he would like for his family.

As he sits there on the park bench, he wishes that his financial problems would end. And:

Well, hey, a little idol, let's ask it for money. And a sackful of gold coins ($5,000 worth) appears in front of him. So he takes it to the racetrack, and asks the idol which horse to bet on. Sure enough, his horse comes in at 20-1 and now he's got $100,000! But you can see trouble ahead:

When his father confronts him over his changed behavior, he decides to throw away the idol. But it doesn't work; when he gets home the idol has magically returned to his pocket. So he sells his rental property and invests in the stock market, which (thanks to the idol's advice) does spectacularly well for him. But as he continues to pursue wealth:

He partners up with another businessman, and they agree that if either dies, the other will be able to buy back his share of the business. But inevitably, the partner becomes an annoyance to Harry and:

Your wish is the idol's command, and the next thing Harry knows, his partner has fallen out the window to his death. He's horrified but again finds himself unable to rid himself of the idol, or his pathological greed. His son is lonely, so he buys the boy a horse. But tragedy strikes as the boy, inexperienced at riding, is killed. His wife leaves him, and even his father, who had always expressed pride in his son:

Devastated, Harry comes to a critical revelation:

And sure enough, the idol disappears. Harry leaves his magnificent estate behind, and wanders back to his old neighborhood. He sees boys playing and realizes that if he had not found that idol, his son would be out there with them. And then suddenly, there's Bobbie, running up to hug him! And his wife, and his dad, who found the Thanksgiving turkey on the park bench. Yep, somehow Harry's been transported back to the start of the story.


Comments: Wow, what a terrific story! I confess, I got about halfway through it and wondered if it was going to be too depressing for a holiday post. Stories like these, almost certainly from the fertile mind of Richard Hughes (who wrote and edited almost single-handedly the entire ACG line of comics) are why I consider American Comics Group to be the great unknown publisher of the Silver Age.

Happy Thanksgiving Day, everybody!

Why is Forbidden Worlds #73 famous (and the single most valuable comic ACG published in the Silver Age)? It's because of this story:

Yep, it's the first appearance of Herbie Popnecker, considered by many to be the greatest character of the ACG line.

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