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Today, we celebrate the 75th anniversary of DC’s forgotten Silver Age star, Tommy Tomorrow.
This is “Look Back,” where every four weeks of a month, I will spotlight a single issue of a comic book that came out in the past and talk about that issue (often in terms of a larger scale, like the series overall, etc.). Each spotlight will be a look at a comic book from a different year that came out the same month X amount of years ago. The first spotlight of the month looks at a book that came out this month ten years ago. The second spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 25 years ago. The third spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 75 years ago. The occasional fifth week (we look at weeks broadly, so if a month has either five Sundays or five Saturdays, it counts as having a fifth week) looks at books from 20/30/40/60/70/80 years ago.
We go back to November 1946 for the introduction of Tommy Tomorrow in Real Fact Comics #6 (by Jack Schiff, George Kashdan, Bernie Breslauer, Howard Sherman and Virgil Finlay).
I’ve covered the launch of Real Fact Comics in a previous Look Back, which was DC’s first attempt to get into the then fairly new area of educational comic books. As you might imagine, in an industry heavily reliant on getting kids to pick your book up off of the spinner rack, educational comic books were a hard sell. Other companies tried working out deals with schools, but it seems Real Fact Comics was still trying to appeal to the normal comic buying audience (or perhaps their parents?).
However, with something like this, naturally the concern was that things were going to be too dry and boring and so here, the editors on the comic decided to try something different in a hope to come up with some more engaging content for the readers while still being educational. Their answer was Tommy Tomorrow!
The obvious idea was to do predictions about the future and present them as a sort of fact, but the weird thing about it is that it seems like they really didn’t bother too much with bothering to be too accurate, considering Tommy enrolls in “Rocket college” in just eight years after the comic book came out…
The Howard Sherman and Virgil Finlay artwork is GORGEOUS, though, right? Look at the action of the rocket taking off!
What’s remarkable to me is just how UNremarkable the story really is. It’s just a sort of basic trip into space, only to Mars…
“Nothing could go wrong…which is a good thing that nothing DID go wrong!”
The feature returned seven issues later and bizarrely, it just ignored the events of the previous adventure and was more of a traditional space adventure…
The same thing happened in Real Fact Comics #18!
Then, editor Mort Weisinger brought Tommy to the pages of Action Comics in 1948’s Action Comics #127 (by Otto Binder, Curt Swan and John Fischetti), and now Tommy is part of a group called the Planeteers…
In the following issue, the Planeteers become more of a police organization…
Tommy then remained a space cop for the next ELEVEN YEARS!
Although, in Action Comics #149, they decided it was a bit unrealistic to have the stories set in the 1990s, so they moved Tommy’s adventures to 2050 (some folks like to consider this Earth-1 Tommy and Earth-2 Tommy, or whatever the equivalent Earths are for the future of those worlds are called)…
He then moved over to World’s Finest Comics for another three years, still under the Weisinger umbrella.
Weisinger then used Tommy for one of his Showcase ideas (each editor was supposed to supply a possible new feature idea for the spotlight anthology, with the most popular ones getting their own ongoing series)…
Oddly enough, the Showcase issues broke from the standard formula of the Tommy stories and were instead flashbacks to his days in the Planeteer Academy.
If you folks have any suggestions for November (or any other later months) 2011, 1996, 1971 and 1946 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we’re discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.
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