Life Sentence!
- by Carl Wessler and Robert Q. Sale
- Comic Book
- Weird Fiction
- YA and Up
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- “Life Sentence!” by Carl Wessler and Robert Q. Sale , Journey into Mystery #42 (Atlas Comics, December 1956).
Leo Sampsom is a four-time thief serving a life sentence. So what has he got to lose when a strange man offers him a pill that will put him back into his own body right before his last theft?
—Michael Main
But what if those pills really work? I’d be out of prison . . . free, back twenty years!
Tags
(7)
- Time Periods
- Circa AD 1930 to 1939: the robbery in 1936
- Circa AD 1950 to 1959: nearly twenty years after the 1936 robbery, so 1955 or 1956.
- Timeline Models
- Multiple Naive Timelines: This is an odd duck because Leo believes that time cannot be changed, but in fact, he’s already changed at least one thing by looking for the money under the floorboard before he went to the safe. And he’s not in a closed loop because at the start of the story, he didn't remember going through the loop before. It wouldn’t take a lot to shift this into a single static timeline, but it’s not there yet. Instead, it’s just multiple timelines that aren’t fully worked out.
- Time Travel Methods
- Themes
- Travels into Yourself: probably Ned’s descendant into Ned, though it’s hard to tell for sure
- Groupings
Variants
(1)
- “Life Sentence!” by Carl Wessler and Robert Q. Sale , Journey into Mystery #42 (Atlas Comics, December 1956).