What a curious story this is from Adventures Into the Unknown. A dad suffers a radiation accident and fathers twin prodigies, “talking like adults at one year!” The boys’ mother is shown fleetingly, in one panel, then vanishes from the story. The twins take to the Lewis Carroll poem, “Jabberwocky,” and work to decipher it. Bruce, the dad, consults a psychiatrist about the twins’ obsession with the poem. The psychiatrist he consults, Dr Bancroft, is the image of Dr Fredric Wertham, famous critic of the comic book industry, and author of the anti-comics book, Seduction of the Innocent. It is an inside joke, but it makes the tale curiouser and curiouser.
Ogden Whitney did the artwork for this atypical ACG entry, from Adventures Into the Unknown #13 (1950). Whitney would go on to draw dozens of stories for ACG over the years, culminating in his time on the brilliant oddball humor of Herbie, where likenesses of famous people appeared often. As far as I know, I believe this is the only time he drew Dr Wertham.
This story is in large part a riff on “Mimsy Were the Borogroves”, a brilliant story from Henry Kuttner and C[atherine] L[ucille] Moore, which first appeared in the issue of Astounding Science Fiction for February 1943. In that story, it was not gamma radiation, but the accidental transmission of educational toys from the future that transformed children.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. “Lewis Carroll”) was noted in his day for his contributions to physics, but his work has proved to be helpful to making the mathematics of quantum physics (unknown his his lifetime) more manageable. By the way, Queen Victoria, familiar with his children's stories, let him known that she'd be pleased if he dedicated his next book to her. His next book was an advanced mathematical treatise; I'm sure that she was a bit surprised and I'd guess that he was more than a bit amused. (But at least he didn't lose his head.)
Dr Bancroft makes a number of highly questionable inferential leaps. One of these is that the boys either would not want to return to his world, or would be able to do so in spite of his having smashed the mirror that served as their portal. Personally, I have little trust in my own ability to discern the desires of people dramatically more intelligent than I.
Daniel, my memory ain't what it used to be (an understatement), but "Mimsy Were the Borogroves" is in several anthologies, and I have at least two or three of them on my bookshelves. My (flimsy) excuse for not remembering is that I haven't read those anthologies in at least 50 years, and probably longer. In the case of "Beware the Jabberwock!" I was more interested in the caricature of Dr Wertham as a main character.
ReplyDeleteI should never be naïve enough to believe a story as unusual as this would be original. ACG wasn’t above swiping from famous authors. Two ACG stories I have previously identified as swipes are from "Rock Diver" by Harry Harrison, and "A Subway Named Möbius" by A.J. Deutsch.
Thanks for your note.
Hi Pappy, This posting has the magic storytelling that keeps me wanting to read every darn comic. Such a superior tale here, even if slifted (slightly lifted). Thank you so much for the fun read.
ReplyDeleteDidn't Kuttner write a series of mysteries featuring a psychiatrist?
ReplyDelete