Whiz Wilson doesn’t appear to have a first name other than Whiz. At least the website, Public Domain Superheroes credits him with that name. Whiz lives up to his name by whizzing into the future, which he did in a handful of adventures in early Sure-Fire Comics and Lightning Comics.
I mentioned in a Whiz Wilson posting from 2014 why I would be shy about visiting the future. You can see that by using the link below.
From Lightning Comics Vol. 2 Number 2 (1941). The Grand Comics Database has no guesses for the writer and artist.
In year 6000 Whiz Wilson has a dictator sign an eternal peace treaty! Just click on the thumbnail.
Whiz Wilson is able, via his Futuroscope, to travel in time. That is science fiction, but I often feel I’m visiting a place called the Future. Watching my fellow citizens with little devices in their hands, sending and receiving messages while ignoring the rest of the world makes me feel out of my own time. Welcome to the brave new world! Personal opinion, anyway...I have a cell phone, yet have never texted a message.
In Lightning Comics #5 (1941) Whiz visits Florida in the year 3000, and according to one man he confronts, it is a world where war and Great Depressions are a thousand years in the past. In the very next panel that perfect Florida is invaded by giant robots. Is Whiz’s timing lucky, so he can help repel “madman” Baron Krawman with his army of mechanical men, or is Whiz the cause? My theory is that by entering the future Whiz has altered it. The idyllic world is suddenly one in danger. Whiz should help out and end the menace. If my theory is correct, he indirectly caused it.
If I was a visitor in 2015 from, say, 1941, perhaps by being out of my own time my presence in an era in which I do not belong would change the future so the cell phone was not the center of so many peoples’ lives. I wouldn’t have to worry about walking or driving amongst so many distracted and self-absorbed people.
As a youngster I was besotted by thoughts of the future: spaceflight to other planets, robot servants, and personal aircraft with which we would zip around the skies just as easily as driving a car. I once said to my father, Big Pappy, “I would love to have a time machine and go into the future!" Big Pappy, never one to go off into tangents of fantasy, brought me swiftly back to reality: “Oh yeah? What if you found out when you were going to die?”
Ulp! I had not considered that. Okay, then, cancel that trip into the future.
Whiz Wilson, featured in Ace Comics’ Lightning Comics, didn’t let such things bother him. He made regular trips into the future and got himself involved in adventures. He even found ways to fight the enemies of 1941 with help from the people of year 6000, as in this tale from Lightning #6 (1941).
Monday, January 25, 2010
Number 673
Whiz Wilson and his Futuroscope
Lightning Comics, a continuation of Ace's Sure-Fire Comics, was a typical anthology comic of the year 1940. It had a superhero, a cowboy, a magician, and Whiz Wilson, a science fiction hero in the Flash Gordon mold. Whiz had what he called a Futuroscope, a really handy device that could move him around in time and space. I'd like one of those, myself. I wonder if anyone has one for sale on eBay...
Anyway, the Grand Comics Database doesn't have any information on Whiz Wilson, but the art in this episode from Lightning Comics #4, is derivative of Alex Raymond, just like a couple of dozen other comic book features. I really don't know how the earliest comics could have existed without Raymond and Hal Foster's Prince Valiant to swipe from.
Just how tied to Flash Gordon was Whiz Wilson? This is the lead sentence from another episode, as quoted by the GCD: "One day Whiz Wilson sets the dials of his Futuroscope to take him to the planet Mongo, in the year 2300..." Mongo. That's where Flash, Flash's girl Dale Arden, Doc Zarkoff and Ming the Merciless hung out.
This particular adventure has Whiz mixing it up with some post-apocalyptic stone age types in South America.
