Reading Room OPERATION: PERIL "Time Travelers: Adventure Among the Stars" Conclusion

When Last We Left the Time Travelers...

...no, they weren't shooting it out with aliens on an airless planetoid, as this misleading Odgen Whitney cover shows, but they have been transported to Saturn, where Tom is about to do battle, unarmed, against a really big green alien...

Will the Saturnians reappear?
And if they do, will it be as friend or foe?

Only writer Richard Hughes and artist Ken Bald, who produced this tale for ACG's Operation Peril #4 (1951) know the answer!

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Time Travelers
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Reading Room OPERATION: PERIL "Time Travelers: Adventure Among the Stars" Part 1

Let's look in on a team of scientific explorers we haven't seen in a while...

...as they decide to seek government financing!

Looks like a classic "man vs alien in hand to hand combat" scenario!

You've seen it in Flash Gordon, Star Trek, and numerous other movies, tv shows, pulps, and comics, right?

But writer Richard Hughes and artist Ken Bald have a couple of surprises up their sleeves, as you see...tomorrow!

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Reading Room: TIME TRAVELERS "Merlin and the Motorcycle Knights"

The previous Time Travelers tale left "serious" sci fi behind...

...and this one tramples it into the ground.

If Tom Refield looks too young to have been an officer in World War II, remember this story was published in 1950, only five years after the end of WWII, so the idea of Tom serving in an Allied unit less than a decade earlier isn't unreasonable!

Written by Richard Hughes and illustrated by Ken Bald, this story from Operation: Peril #3 (1950) enters straight fantasy with the introduction of Merlin (non-magical and surprisingly traitorous) and King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table.
Next issue introduces alien menaces and an ongoing emphasis on space opera.

Despite this, the series' title will remain "Time Travelers" for the entire run.

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Reading Room TIME TRAVELERS "Amazons of Venus"

"We must beat the Communists to Venus..."

"...in order to prevent the atomic war predicted by Nostradamus!"

The first Time Travelers tale was a fairly-straightforward 1950s sci-fi story.
But this one goes wayyyy out there with numerous cliches of the era including...

Cavemen and dinosaurs co-existing in prehistoric times!

Venus as a vegetation-covered world ruled by beautiful, half-clad women who keep their males subservient!

Commie spies in business suits...even when they're on another world!

Travel between planets taking about the same amount of time as the average morning commute!

Written by Richard Hughes and illustrated by Ken Bald, this story from Operation: Peril #2 (1950) expands the strip's concept to include space and time travel by integrating the time technology into a spacecraft provided by the US government.

As a result, the emphasis will switch from Communist threats to alien attacks.

Despite this, the series' title will remain "Time Travelers" for the entire run.

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Reading Room TIME TRAVELERS "Date with Danger"

Sci-fi of the 1950s wasn't limited to space opera...

...as this series from the AGC adventure anthology comic Operation: Peril demonstrates!

Operation: Peril was an interesting multi-genre anthology featuring on-going strips about time travel (as seen above), a hard-boiled private eye (Danny Danger), and high adventure in the Pacific (Typhoon Tyler), as well as a historical short story.

While the other series featured stand-alone stories, Time Travelers presented a couple of on-going plotlines, as you'll see in future posts.

Though Time Travelers didn't appear on the first few covers, by issue #4, they took over the cover spot until their final appearance in #12, after which the book changed focus and became a war comic.

This premiere tale from Operation: Peril #1 (1950) was written by Richard Hughes and illustrated by Ken Bald.

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