Unca Cheeks the Toy Wonder's Silver Age Comics Web Site!
... or: "How Can You Be In Two
Places At Once, When You Aren't Anywhere At All...?" (PART
TWO)
Whereas most of the SUPERMAN time travel stories of the Silver Age were nowhere near as genuinely loopy or flat-out fun as the SUPERBOY ones... what they lacked in giddiness, they (frequently) more than compensated for in their cheerful willingness to subvert the DC canon and ethos, entire.
What began as a simple, straightforward oak tree of an origin story ("Star-child is rocketed to Earth from doomed planet; grows up to become super-savior.") became -- over the years; anent one time travel-spawned "revelation" after another -- a sort of conceptual Christmas tree, baubles and bunting strewn throughout its branches with but scant thought (if any at all) afforded as to whether or not any one decoration might "clash" with another...
...or even the possibility that the entire over-laden enterprise might end up so ridiculously "top-heavy," as it were -- once-proud branches sagging, now, under the accumulated weight of years of auctorial detritus -- that it (sooner or later) might very well topple over, under its own now-elephantine weight.
Take this little eight-pager, for example: "How Jimmy Olsen First Met Superman." [See panel reproduction, at top of this page]
It's a down-at-the-heels, pre-Daily Planet Jimmy we see as the story opens, arriving in Metropolis from whichever bucolic burg it was (some, quaint, homey little Lovecraftian genetic backwater, I imagine) in which he was originally spawned, whelped or what-have-you. Eager to "make it on my own, here in Metropolis," the freckled male ingenue quickly secures temporary lodgings for himself, and answers an ad in the newspaper seeking "volunteers "to make trial flights of [a] new ship."
Said "ship" turns out, in fact, to be an experimental time machine. (Metropolis was just plain lousy with deranged, hermetic scientist-
types during the Silver Age. Helpless, whey-faced young "volunteers"
being offered handfuls of loose change and mercilessly subjected to "experiments"
such as [say] being teleported into the hearts of far-distant suns; transformed
into giant, telepathic hedgehogs, or tarted up in frilly "French maid"
outfits and forced to grovel and submit to... well. It was all something
of a scandal, really. Not the sort of thing the higher-ups
at DC Comics like to talk about much, nowadays.) 
"I'll take my chances, sir!" the plucky lad confidently exclaims.
("This contraption probably won't work anyway," he adds, inwardly.
"It's too fantastic!") (The possibilities of being locked
within a homemade device which might very well end up bursting into flames
-- or even exploding -- not having occurred, obviously, to the
boy genius, here. Five bucks says he was forced to leave
home, at gunpoint, by local fathers who were plainly terrified
at the prospect of one of their backwards backwoods daughters taking a
quick skinny-dip in the gene pool with this clown. I'm just
sayin', is all.)
Well. One thing leads to another, and Our Jimmy ends up not only shunted back into the past... but onto another planet, to boot.
The planet Krypton, to be precise.
Being as fluent as any native in the Kryptonian tongue, proper (I'm thinking "high school language elective," here; either that, or else Cruelly Tortured Coincidence. And you...?), "Jim-My Ol-Sen" -- his [*kaff*kaff*] "Kryptonian' name, don'cha know? -- quickly snags for himself the plum position of Alien Au Pair to the tiny "Kal-El" (i.e., You-Know-Who).
[Interesting Observation: at no point whatsoever does Our Jim-My take the opportunity -- born, remember, of his own (comparative) prescience, re: What's Going To Happen Within the Next Few Days, Planetary Explosions-Wise -- to sidle up to ol' Jor-El and whisper something even moderately helpful, such as: "Make the damn rocket ship bigger. NOW."
[Now: maybe such an action would have had no effect on how things turned
out for the "El" family, regardless. Maybe history can't
be changed by means of extra-temporal intervention. However: this
was Jimmy Olsen's very first time trip EVER; he certainly couldn't
have known for certain whether it'd work or not; and he didn't
even make the effort. Swell guy, this "Jim-My Ol-Sen," huh...?]
In any event: after teaching the Not-Yet-Super-Toddler a much-needed lesson in Obedience To Adult Authority Figures, via a judiciously-applied spanking (don't ask, f'chrissakes), "Jim-My" manages to use Professor Crane's time machine to skedaddle his self back to the present-day, just scant moments before the whole planetary kit'n'kaboodle went to pieces faster than Patsy Cline in her histrionic heyday. (Without offering to save so much as a single, solitary Kryptonian man, woman or child from Certain Death, I might add. I'm beginning not to like this "Jim-My" guy overmuch, by this point in the storytelling proceedings.)
Back in the Here and Now, Jimmy is startled -- moments after leaving the Professor's lab -- by the arrival of none other than Superman, his own big, bad self! The Alien Altruist all but forces "this special ultra-sonic signal watch I made" onto the frantically squirming youth (who's probably thinking, at this point: "... omigawd! He wants me to be his helpless human love thang! MOMMMEEEEEE -- !").
It turns out that (as Superman helpfully explains) "When I came to Earth
and gained super-memory, I recalled how you were my baby sitter
on Krypton for a while!" And -- as those of you who've already perused
Page Two of the "Sadism; Sweethearts; and the Silver
Age SUPERMAN" entry elsewhere on this site will doubtless recall --
The Man of Steel has this real... ummmmm... "thing" for baby sitters.
Not that I'm, y'know, implying anything here, really. Honest.
Time travel stories often brought out the more bizarrely paternalistic, Type-"A" side of The Big Blue Boy Scout, back in the Silver Age day. For a pluperfect example of this quasi-psychological phenomenon, we need look no farther than the 1961 tale entitled "Superman's Greatest Feats," in which The Man of Steel surrenders -- for all practical intents and purposes -- to the impulse to...
... well... to play God, really.
A telepathic distress signal from long-time mermaid "squeeze" Lori Lemaris (... and please, please, pretty please tell me I'm not the only one here who always thought that particular "relationship" was a little on the "creepy" side. I mean: she's a freaking halibut from the WAIST DOWN, all right? She eats... I dunno... plankton, maybe. That's not good.) brings Superman to said damsel's aid, re: an unexploded underwater depth charge.
Superman gets guilt-tripped by Lori into attempting a let's-keep-
Atlantis-from-sinking-into-the-sea mission back in time. (I'm thinking that the fact she's constantly floating up against him while wearing a wet t-shirt might have played a fairly crucial role in this momentuous decision. It's the hopeless romantic in me.) He be-bops his temporal way back to the fateful moment in question, all the while dead dog certain that he can only fail, due to the irrevocable, immutable DC Comics "law" stating that History Can Never Be Changed...
... and, by golly: the big blue lummox actually pulls it off!
Stunned by the realization that he's just pulled off the chronal equivalent of twelve consecutive inside straights, Superman further tests his (seemingly) newfound ability to Alter Reality As We Know It by (in succession) rescuing a gaggle of Christian martyrs from becoming Lion Kibble in the Roman Colosseum; saving the life of American patriot Nathan ("I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country") Hale; averting the massacre of Custer's troops at Little Big Horn; and thwarting the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
At this juncture -- having now convincingly ascertained that he is,
in fact, The Big Kahuna of the Time Stream -- a truly Wise and
Just (Semi-)Deity might have elected to prevent the future birthings of
anyone destined to be instrumental with the creation and/or popularization
of, say, the Macarena. Superman, however, selfishly opts instead
to prevent the deaths of a few billion or so Kryptonians, re: the destruction
of his alien homeworld. (It's just "me me ME" all the time
with this guy, isn't it...?)
I won't keep you all teetering there, on the precipice of unendurable suspense: Yup. He Done Did It.
A quick precautionary look-see through the history books of the present day, however, presents a startled Superman with an ego-deflating shocker: even though he'd actually witnessed and experienced having altered the predestined course of history, half a dozen times over... none of said changes had actually been effected!
It turns out that -- in attempting to bring about so many radical
changes in the warp and woof of the temporal tapestry -- the Man of Steel
actually "slipped" into (or else created, outright) an alternate
UNIVERSE. (D'OHH -- !) Which, for my
money, ain't exactly small potatoes, power-wise, neither... but, then,
I'd probably have used said knowledge to create an entire world
of sex-crazed Salma Hayeks, come to think. So, all things being
equal: we should all probably be darned grateful that I''m not
the one flitting about in the big blue body stocking. I'm just sayin',
is all.
No recounting of the Silver Age DC's most whacked-out moments in time travel, however, would be complete without the immortal example of... Krypto, the Mass Murdering Time-Traveling Cow!
A chance encounter with some Red Kryptonite (gawd, but I miss that stuff!) transforms the Doggie of Derring-Do into a sentient blue bovine during a quick joy-jaunt into the days of Old Chicago. The hapless hound, in a fit of poochie pique, kicks over a kerosene lantern...
... and, thus, becomes directly responsible for The Great Chicago
Fire! (Bad doggie! Bad, BAD doggie!)
A few years after the publication of this story, a great many of this
nation's youth turned to illegal hallucinogenic drugs in a big, big
way. The Truth Is Out There, People.
[The author would like to thank site regular J. Kevin Carrier
for selflessly supplying the page reproduction for this last entry, by
the by. The man has been one of this site's earliest (and most enthusiastic)
supporters, from Day One. I'd probably do this, week in and week
out, even if he were the only one reading these things. You're
a god, JK.)
More fun'n'games in the Silver Age DC time stream... on the page immediately
following!
Time Travel In the DC Comics of the Silver
Age (PAGE ONE)
Time Travel In the DC Comics of the Silver Age (PAGE THREE)
Time Travel In the DC Comics of the Silver Age (PART FOUR)
Time Travel In the DC Comics of the Silver Age (PART FIVE)
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