Dan Hagen, Time Master

DC Comics' Showcase 26 from May-June 1960, at right, has cover art by Joe Kubert.

Within a half-century span, comic books can effectively operate as limited-range time machines for me.

Because I loved them so much when I was young, just reading a Silver Age story can take me back to that precise moment in that spring of 1960 when I was 5 and the world’s colors all seemed as vivid as those four in the comics, or that autumn of 1962 when I was 7 and the civilization of the planet Earth actually faced destruction, or that January of 1966 when I was 11 and one of my superheroes was, wonder of wonders, suddenly the biggest hit on television.

So reading a feature like Rip Hunter, Time Master is an ironic experience in seeing time, both real and fictional, collapse upon itself, something like one of those paintings of an infinite regression…