I stumbled across a copy of the September 1964 issue of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen comic on-line recently, which contains a time travel story called The Red Headed Beatle of 1,000BC. One of its captions reads “Shortly, in the distant past”, and that phase stuck in my head, so I wrote this:
Lines Inspired by a Jimmy Olsen Caption
by Paul Slade
Shortly, in the distant past,
The first comes in behind the last,
The evening’s early, morning’s late,
Your history fills a future date,
Time’s arrow turns the other way,
And June surrenders unto May,
Slow progress circles backward, fast,
Shortly, in the distant past.
My God, those old comic stories were so dumb. And look at that cover- the kids are so into Jimmy’s drum playing that they don’t notice a brightly colored man FLOATING IN THE AIR RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM.
I’d prefer to call them charmingly silly comics, written for an audience of children and young teens at a time when people of that age were perhaps a little more innocent than they are today.
Even now, I’d rather read Jimmy Olsen circa 1964 than one of the cynical over-produced torture porn outings that passes for a superhero comic these days. Are we really all so dour that even a kids’ comic isn’t allowed to be entertainingly daft just for the sheer fun of it?
Maybe “dumb”* is* a bit harsh. I grew up reading every comic book I could get my mitts on, so I know the zaniness of the plotlines. I read somewhere that the editor at the time actually consulted a group of kids for story ideas, like making Jimmy a robot for example. I loved the old stories. And I, too, would rather read an old comic than that new airbrushed looking stuff. Yecch.
“Across the Universe” almost fits. It’ll need a refrain, though, for the “Hai guru deva om / Nothing’s going to change my world” part. Maybe “Zeee–Zeee–Zeee–Jeepers! Kirby says, ‘Don’t ask! Just buy it!’”