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 ONE)
It always has been; presently is; and (doubtless) will evermore remain the single screwiest element of the DC Comics canon.
Time travel, I mean; not DC's HAWKMAN continuity.
(Although that one certainly does make for a darned close second, come
to think.) 
This multi-page site entry -- I warn you, one and all; here and now -- is going to be a singularly massive one. Once I set about to researching precisely which published examples would prove necessary to explicating this particular chronological cat's cradle... I quickly came to the conclusion that we were talking Major Freaking Undertaking, here.
Scads of scanned comics pics.
Great heaping gobs of accompanying text.
Those of you who are "into" this sort of thing: kick off your shoes;
settle back; have a Coke and a smile. You done just hit the motherlode.
For the saner ones of you, out there: there are (as of this writing)
nearly one hundred and sixty other comics-related pages on this site.
And none of those, I assure you, will cause your heads to pound and swell
the way this one most assuredly will. (The Space
Canine Patrol Agents page, in particular, is one holy heck of A Real
Good Time, IMHO.)
Final note, before diving headlong into the temporal firepits: many of
the comics stories following were suggested for this author's usage by the hard-drinkin',
two-fisted, barrel-chested he-men (and he-women) of the redoubtable Silver
Age Round Table discussion group. To these good folks -- Al;
Bill; Chris; EJ; J. Kevin; Joe; Ken;
Kerry; Louise; Rich; and Tom -- this page (and the
ones following) are respectfully dedicated, with gratitude eternal. Remind
me to shoot you all later, as soon as no one's looking.
Let's start with the Superboy story entitled "The Impossible Mission." [See panel reproduction, at the top of this page]
The temporal table is set with a scene wherein the Boy of Steel is shown musing
pensively whilst observing a staged city park re-enactment of Abraham Lincoln's
"Gettysburg Address." (Later on, there was a Nude Father-and-Son "Leaves of
Grass" Poetry Competition. Not for nothing was the bucolic Smallville
known throughout the greater part of Kansas as "Party Town, U.S.A.")
A chance musing on the part of the venerable "Pa" Kent, to the effect that "it's a shame that such a great, great man was cruelly slain while still so young" occasions in the uniquely suggestible Superboy One Heck of a Crazy Nutty Kookoo Idea: travel backwards in time, and attempt to prevent the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
For the all-but-omnipotent uberteen, To Think Was To Do, time travel-wise. By doing the same thing he usually did in order to visit his Legion of Super- Heroes chums in the 30th Century (only, you know, in reverse), Jor-El Junior quickly finds himself flitting about the skies above the infamous "Ford Theater," circa April 14th, 1865.
However: in a plot twist that nicely underscores the meta-temporal migraines inherent in this whole "traveling through time" shtick, the young Superboy is startled to encounter a fully adult Lex Luthor cooling his mean'n'nasty heels at a nearby hotel! [Again, see accompanying page, above]
"I suppose you're wondering what I'm doing here, Superboy!" Luthor helpfully exposits to the Red Kryptonite-paralyzed youth. (Oh, yeah: he had this big, honkin' hunk o' Red Kryptonite with him, did Luthor. Back in the '50's and '60's, Kryptonite was as common as dust bunnies under your bed. They sold it in gas station vending machines, even.) "In order to escape from Superman, who was after me in the year 1960, I invented a time machine and escaped into the past."
(Everydamnbody was doing the "backwards, turn backwards, O Time in thy
flight" thing, you see, back in the DC Comics Silver Age.Superman;
Superboy; the Flash; the Atom;
the Legion of Super-Heroes; Wonder Woman... the
real wonder of it all was that nobody ever ended up crashing headlong
into one another at hyper-light speeds, during all of this. That's
all I can say.)
In any event: thus immobilized and helpless, Superboy is unable to prevent thespian-turned-trigger man John Wilkes Booth from doing the awful thing history says he did; and the vile Lex Luthor, in turn...
... recoils in fully palpable revulsion, once the enormity of his actions finally dawns upon him.
It's a lovely (albeit gruesome) moment: the monstrous mad scientist whipsawing violently from a husked, horrified acknowledgment of his own "guilt" ("So that's it! You... you came into the past, not to capture me... but to save the life of Lincoln from an assassin's bullet!") to frenzied, hysterical denial ("I didn't know...! Blast you, don't stare at me like that!") and back again ("Lincoln's blood is on my hands...! I-I'm sorry... sorry... sorry...").
This was pretty much as nifty as time-travel stories ever got in the DC Universe, back in the day (in general), and in SUPERBOY, in particular.
A lesser (but still quite interesting) effort, overall, was "Superboy Meets Robin, the Boy Wonder." [See panel reproductions, below]
While lounging about "in his secret citadel, dusting trophies from past exploits" (it says here), Superboy is confronted by the suddenly materialized figure of a temporally-displaced Robin, the Boy Wonder.
The Caped Cherub informs a slack-jawed and stupefied Superboy that he has winged himself backwards in time in order to save the latter's life. It seems that Superman had fallen prey to a cunningly long-range "booby trap," in the form of a Kryptonite-laden souvenir "clock" from his Smallville days. [See panel reproductions, below]
The choice of a clock as the means of delivery for said death-trap proved to be an auger of ill-omen, as the grief-stricken Robin is later informed by Superman's attending physician that "Superman is dying. It's only a matter of time, now..."
Not for nothing, however, had the plucky pre-teen been trained by the preternaturally indomitable and resourceful Batman (i.e., The Closest Thing To G-O-D In the DC Universe, Entire). High-tailing his bad self over to the laboratory of long-time BATMAN supporting character "Professor Nichols," who just happened to have his own "time-ray" handy and gathering dust in the far corner, over by the signed, framed photograph of Eleanor Roosevelt -- crazed, hermit scientists have "needs" too, y'know -- Robin be-bopped himself fifteen or twenty years into the past, the better to prevent Mickey's Big Hand from tolling the hour dreadful.
The story, itself, is a rather confused (and confusing) affair, from this point onwards, with a fairly pointless "idiot sub-plot" involving Superboy's growing distrust of Robin which could be (and ought to have been) resolved in less time than it took you to read this sentence, just now. However, there are several nice "touches" here and there... such as Robin's panicky warning to Superboy that the young Lex Luthor (him again -- !) "... will be your greatest enemy when you are a Superman!"
Having Superboy meet heroes who would later prove to be his fast friends in the future was a popular storytelling device, during this particular period in the DC canon. Aside from Robin, Superboy also managed to team up with a young "Bruce Wayne"; an adolescent "Aquaboy"; and even -- swear to Jesus -- a pre-Green Arrow "Oliver Queen."
This last one, in particular, is just deliriously goofy enough to merit
closer examination.
As the story opens, Superboy is shown puttering about "in a hidden basement room of the Kent home"... specifically, in an attempt to "perfect this time machine gadget I've been tinkering with for years."
The Teen of Tomorrow, you see, is keen to perfect said device in the hope that: "If I can ever get it to work, I'll be able to tune in on the past and observe past crimes while they were being committed! I'd recognize the criminals, and pick them up easily."
(If -- at this juncture -- you're scratching your head puzzledly and wondering
why someone who can travel through time, unaided, as easily as you or I might
trundle ourselves towards the refrigerator during a television commercial would
even require such a mechanism in the first place... well: welcome to Club Cheeks. Here's your table; the wine steward will be with
you momentarily.)
In any event: a few twistings of the frammiztat here, and some judicious fine-tuning of the golliwhazzit there, and the device crackles to an eerie electronic semblance of life. A hushed and awed Superboy watches as a costumed adventurer of some near-future epoch -- operating under the code-name of "Green Arrow" (but whose costume, inexplicably, is colored a bright and eye-popping red throughout the story entire) -- engages in some appropriately "showy" bow-and-arrow crime-fightin' exploits.
He also discovers, whilst engaged in this little exercise in temporal "Peeping Tom"-ism, that this "Green Arrow's" real name is "Oliver Queen"... a little informational bon-bon, of sorts, which all but lodges in his throat several days later, when a new student transfers into Clark Kent's school.
A new student by the name of... Oliver Queen.
"I wonder..." the Dumbstruck Do-Gooder muses (in that adorably quasi-Messianic
way he's always had); "... has fate selected me to launch him on
his career?" (In later years, the Self-Adoring Super-Teen would also attempt
to lay claim to the creation of the first polio vaccine; sole authorship of
Shakepeare's First Folio; and a querulous insistence that he'd "had"
Marcia, Jan and Cindy Brady. All at the same time.)
In the course of the following weeks, opportunities aplenty do, in fact, arise for a solicitous "guardian Superboy" to set the young Oliver Queen on the footpath of what will (one day) prove to be his own costumed career. However: one teensy, itsy-bitsy... ummmmm... problem continually presents itself, in this regard:
Oliver Queen is -- case closed; hands down; and no argument -- the single worst
"shot" with a bow and arrow in the history of the entire freakin' human race.
The singularly cute "twist" to this story is that -- for all of his single-minded mania towards intriguing the young Oliver, re: the decidedly therapeutic element inherent in firing upon people with one of the world's deadliest hand-held weapons -- Superboy is, ultimately, not only crashingly unsuccessful...
...but actually (albeit inadvertently) convinces his fellow teen that he, in
fact: "... must be the world's worst archer."
Thus duly humbled, a chastened Boy of Steel took the set-back with his usual equanimity and elan, taking but a few scant moments to torch every stray cat within the Smallville city limits with his heat vision.
Kidding. Kidding.
Check out Page Two, immediately following, for more muy whack-o examples
of TIME TRAVEL IN THE DC UNIVERSE... Silver Age style.
Time Travel In the DC Comics of the Silver Age
(PAGE TWO)
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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