Thursday, July 9, 2009

Golden Age idol--Mark Swift And The...What The #$%^?!?

Next up on Golden Age Idol, a sure-fire winner:

Yup, Mark Swift and the....huh?

O...K...

Curious way to...um...phrase things. Surely they didn't keep that title throughout the series??

O...K...

So what the hell was the deal, anyway?

Sorry, I know that's tough to read. Mark Swift was really the sidekick in these stories, an orphan who lived with grade school teacher Rodney Kent. Mr. Kent also "discovered the amazing principle of time travel in his spare time." Geez, I guess teachers are underpaid.

So this grade school teacher went into his basement and whipped up...uh...a....

Time retarder.

Man, I really can't go on here. Time retarder? What the #$%^?!?

Now look--you've upset Paula:

Sorry, Mark Swift, you're rejected. Get out.

Mark Swift And The Time Retarder ran in Fawcett's Slam-Bang Comics and Master Comics in the early 1940s.


2 comments:

  1. On the face of it, "time retarder" really is not more odd than "fire-retardant". And by having a schoolteacher invent it really just takes the trope of pulp science-fiction and comic-book mad scientists, where nearly all important inventions are the work of loners working in private labs to its logical conclusion. (Isn't it funny how often in science-fiction and comics an invention cannot be duplicated and becomes irretrievably lost at the death of the guy who came up with it?)
    BTW, at least until the 19th century quite a bit of important scholarly and scientific work (e.g. Ohm's Law, 1826/27) was done by school-teachers, indeed it often expected of them to engage in this type of pursuit outside of lessons.

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