Otto Binder

John Dakin considers paradoxes as he communicates by radio with his future descendant.

The first two issues of Top-Notch Comics had a feature called “Scott Rand in the Worlds of Time” written by science fiction staple Otto Binder and drawn by his older brother, Jack (rather than Earl). Rand first drove his time car back to Rome in 200 A.D. where he picked up Thor. In the second episode, they went to New York in 2000 A.D. Jack Binder continued the episodes of Rand and Thor in Top-Notch 3, heading to Mars of the future, but I don’t yet know whether there were any other stories.

This title morphed into Top-Notch Laugh Comics, and was then acquired by Archie Comics. I don’t know whether there were any further adventures in time by Rand or others during the Top-Notch run.

Kid Eternity, a lead character in Quality Comics title Hit Comics from #25 to #60 and in eighteen issues of his own title, died before his time, and when he returned to Earth he was able to call real and fictional heroes out of the past to help him fight Nazis and other bad guys.

I was surprised when I ran across the first issue of Science Fiction Plus (Mar 1953) and saw Hugo Gernsback, Editor, staring back at me from the top-right corner of the cover. Somehow I assumed that Wonder Stories was his last foray into what he called scientifiction, or even that he’d died when that magazine became Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1936. But, no, here he was again, albeit for only seven issues (Mar-Dec 1953) and with Sam Moskowitz behind the scenes.

That first issue had this Otto Binder story in which a farmer takes two archaeologists, Stoddard and Jackson, to a time capsule that’s so unusual it couldn’t possibly have been buried by any known civilization. They take it to the Archeological Institute where their boss instructs them to clean up the outside apparently believing that they’ll stop once it’s clean.

When teenager Tod Holton dons the magical green beret that was given to him by his uncle, Tod turns into a muscular adult green beret soldier himself with whatever magic power seems to be needed at the moment—including the power of time travel. In the first issue, Tod travels back to a World War II battle in the Black Forest; in the second (and final) issue, Tod plays a role in the American Revolution.

There’s a papal dispensation (straight from Clifford Simak) that allows me to list all comic book adaptations of The Time Machine, even if they appeared after 1969. This Alex Niño version was printed as a small black and white graphic novel at least twice (Pendulum Press B&W 1973 and Academic Industries Pocket Classics 1984,). I haven’t seen it directly, but I recently found out that it was colored and printed as the second issue of the Marvel Classics series (cover by Gil Kane), which I first read in Pullman in early 1976. The storyline follows the 1960 movie closely.