tales of SILVER AGE TIME TRAVEL
travel back to JOURNEY into MYSTERY #101–102 (FEB–MAR 1964)
—That THOR up there, in JACK KIRBY’s drawing, is not your usual childhood Thor. For one thing, he’s missing his hammer (n.b., the sword), and for another, he’s young Thor, long before the arrival of DR. DON BLAKE. But before I get to the story of young Thor and how he presented me with one of my first time travel anti-themes, there’s another time travel story to relate from Journey into Mystery #101 and #102—in fact, the first two-part time travelin’ epic in the Silver Age of Marvel Comics!
As you know, the mighty Thor had met and vanquished ZARRKO, the TOMMORROW MAN way back in JOURNEY into MYSTERY 86. After the drubbing that Zarrko took, there was no way he’d ever again show his face in the pages of Journey into Mystery. Besides that, the advanced Red Cross workers of 2262 had assured Thor that Zarrko’s memory would never return. Never. Nothing on Earth could ever change that. The world was definitely safe.
And yet, there was Irving from behind the Rexall counter in early 1964, handing seven-year-old me my reserved copy of Journey into Mystery 101. “Look who’s back. Mikey!” he said as he relieved me of my twelve cents. (Yep, even before modern comic book shops, loyal soda jerks provided a friendly neighborhood reserved comics service to dedicated kids across the fifty states.)
The whole idea seemed so improbable that I had to read the story then and there at the soda counter. It began with Thor on a rampage in the streets of New York. The penciled splash page you see below is Kirby’s original drawing before GEORGE ROUSSOS inked it. I stumbled upon it at a terrific site, whatifkirby.com, which in this case asked the question: What if JOE SINNOTT had inked the return of Zarrko? Jump over to their site for the answer, at least for the splash page. And notice how angry Thor is. He’s determined to give ODIN himself a piece of his mind (and maybe a piece of that lamppost he just destroyed).
By the start of ’64, the Avengers, including Thor, were Marvel’s latest production, and three of Thor’s fellow teammates quickly headed out to the Van Wyck Expressway to head off the Norse God. Captain America wasn’t with them because he hadn’t yet been thawed out; Hulk, too, was also nowhere to be seen, since he’d had a falling out with the team the previous month.
But Thor ignores his pals, instead deciding to destroy a truck before stomping off to brood about how his father, the noble Odin, refuses to grant permission for Thor to marry JANE FOSTER. The brooding rampage is carried all the way to Asgard, where ODIN lays down the law while LOKI takes advantage of the chaos to sound the Well of Centuries! Pay close attention here, true believer!
When I read those six panels, one question surfaced in my mind: Was that actually time travel?! Loki was still in Asgard, wasn’t he?, just peering into the well. And yet, he’d had an effect on the future, restoring Zarrko’s memory and setting the evil scientist on a new collision path with the God of Thunder. Trying to figure out whether that was actual time travel was quite a conundrum. Now, you and I know that Irving was good for many things, but sorting out time travel problems was not one of those things. Fortunately, I knew who could help: I bought a Greetings-from-Omaha penny postcard (sporting a B-52 and a cow, side-by-side in full color), and another four cents went toward a stamp. On the back of the card, I explained the situation to Grandpa Main. Is this time travel? I asked, or merely observation?
I popped the postcard in the mail slot at the end of the soda counter and returned to the story, which seemed a bit of an anticlimax at that point. Zarrko not only rebuilt his time machine, but he also designed and built a giant indestructible ROBOT to manhandle Thor. The pair then headed to twentieth century New York City, oddly arriving just after the aforementioned Asgard events. How did Zarrko know to go to that time? I suspect that Loki planted that thought in Zarrko’s mind because the God Mischief knew that Zarrko hadn’t previously come back for a return bout with Thor. As for Thor, he’s still brooding, but he also knows his duty, and heads for the site of Zarrko’s destruction.
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I hope you don’t mind, but I have an aside that has little to do with time travel. Back in the sixties, I was fascinated by the way that comics were colored. I knew there was a limited number of colors, most of which I could match fairly well from my box of 64 Crayola crayons. And even without a magnifying glass, I could see that many of the colors were made up of visible dots of more basic colors. Sometimes, at the edge of an object, you could see those dots overflowing out of the lines. It sounds crude, but it had a comfort to it that I can’t fully explain, except to say that when coloring went digital sometime in the late 1980s, the comfort was lost. JOHN HILGART has done an excellent job of explaining the four-color process in his blog, In Defense of Dots. You’ll enjoy the read. In the months since I started my own blog, I’ve been experimenting with digital recoloring of scans of old comics in a way that conveys some of the look and feel and comfort of the 1960s comics I grew up with, even when displayed on a digital monitor. The main aspects are the saturated colors and the dots. I’d also like to bring in the effect of misaligned colors, but as of yet, my left brain hasn’t allowed my right brain to do so. I’ll keep you posted on my progress in that area. Meanwhile, here’s an original panel from the issue at hand plus a panel that shows the start of my recoloring attempt: I’d been planning to use this panel as the featured image in today’s blog, but then I stumbled on that drawing you see of young Thor, which we’ll get back to later. In any case, I hope you enjoy my attempts to time travel via four colors, kind of like the immersion time travel mechanism in JACK FINNEY’s Time and Again. |
Where were we? Oh, yes: Thor races to the rescue without realizing the extent to which his powers were sapped by the earlier run-in with Odin. This is not gonna end well, I think, and indeed it doesn’t. In just three pages, Zarrko’s robot immobilizes Thor as Loki grins from the sidelines. Zarrko then takes the captured God of Thunder back to the 23rd century and . . . Holy Odin! The story is continued in the next issue!!!
It was a long, anxious month.
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But it would have been longer had Grandpa Main not quickly responded to my postcard. As usual, he responded to my question with something new for me to read—a long story called A Christmas Carol by CHARLES DICKENS—and Grandpa gave me a new question: Does SCROOGE time travel? Every Tom, Dick and Tiny Tim knows A Christmas Carol, and they all seem to think Scrooge is a great early example of time travel. But remember, I came to it fresh at age seven with Grandpa Main’s question in my mind. To me it was obvious: Of course Scrooge and the spirits weren’t time traveling. They were merely observing the past or the future, and had no means of interacting with it. That wasn’t time travel. That was watching TV. Read this quote from their travel to the past, and see what you think:
Even THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST himself admits there’s no interaction with the past. Yes, observation is permitted, but no interaction. In general, I thought, if you can’t interact with the past and the past can’t detect you, then that’s not time travel. Fair enough, but what about THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS FUTURE? Isn’t he at least bringing information from the future to Scrooge? Transfer of information from the future to the past may be boring compared to people-travel, but it is time travel, so A Christmas Carol must be granted membership in the time travel club, don’t you think? Ah, not so fast! At one point, Scrooge asks a pertinent question:
Dickens sure knew how to pose a dickens of a question. The answer is critical to whether time travel occurs. The difference between things that May Be and things that Will Be is like the difference between DAMON KNIGHT and DORIS DAY: Both are quite creative, but for time travel, only one of those two will do. The scary Ghost of Christmas Future never answers the question, and moreover, Scrooge appears intent on not having the future he sees come true. So, I want to say that Scrooge saw only a prediction or a prophecy or a vision of the future—all of which are creative, but do not involve definitive transfer of information from the future. For all we know, that Future Ghost merely had one of CHARLES BABBAGE’s fancy computing machines, programmed by ADA LOVELACE to compute a probable future. That’s not time travel. And what about Loki? Was there time travel at the Well of Centuries? Yes, I concluded. His experience was different that Scrooge’s ghosts because Loki affected the future as he watched. He may not have gone there himself, but he sent something that had an effect on Zarrko. There was a transfer of information between them. Thor, now a prisoner of Zarrko in the future, will certainly attest to that. So, I sat down and wrote a new postcard to Grandpa Main. In it, I laid down two rules:
To me these seemed like important plotlines that may occur in many stories, but whatever they were, they were not time travel. When Grandpa wrote back, he deemed them to be the first of two Time Travel Anti-Themes, and he instructed me to be on the lookout for other such devious impostors. |
Even with the distraction of Dickens, I kept a close eye on the calendar, anxiously awaiting the next issue of Journey into Mystery. But by the time of the expected arrival, my family had moved from downtown Omaha to family housing on the nearby Air Force base. Of course, that meant that I could no longer bike over to the corner Rexall’s. Instead, I had to wait for Mom’s first weekly trip to the Base Exchange. I had no intention of trusting her to get the right comics in mint condition, so I rode along with her, leaving her to do her shopping while I sought out the newsstand. It wasn’t hard to find, and when I got there, Irving (yes, of course, he’d moved to the base, too) had my copy of Journey into Mystery #102 waiting.
“Thanks!” I told Irving, and I dove right into the story. But somehow, the story was a disappointment. The first three pages were spent retelling the first half of the story—didn’t Stan and Jack realize I’d already read that? Then Zarrko forced Thor to wreak some havoc in the future. I wondered where the Thor of 2264 was. Thor-of-our-day then fights a robot octopus. Thor eventually wins and puts Zarrko on ice before heading back to the twentieth century.
After that, the issue had a cute little alien story drawn by Larry Lieber. Then I turned to the last story.
Holy Odin again! That’s a young Thor—still a teenager—with a sword instead of a hammer! Is this more time travel? No, as it turned out, there was no time travel involved. The story was just one of the new Tales of Asgard, which told the origins of the Norse gods. But there was an interesting coincidence: Those three mysterious figures in the background? They weren’t your ordinary robed radicals. They were the three Norse Fates, who foretold that Thor would indeed be worthy of Odin’s hammer some day, but not until he met Death.
Yep, a prophecy! But Grandpa and I knew how to handle prophecies: Time Travel Anti-Theme #2! ’Nuff said!
Coming Soon!
Hey! Look who’s menacing DOCTOR STRANGE! That’s right! It’s none other than Thor’s most dangerous enemy, the ever-lovin’ LOKI! in Strange Tales 123!
Don’t miss it on the first Wednesday of May!