It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I am a HUGE Silver Age comic book fan. I mean, if you’re looking for the pure, unbridled release of sheer imagination then what’s not to love about one of the wackiest but most creative eras in comic book history?

Sure, there are the modern comic book detractors who label the comics from the late fifties and sixties “camp” and “castrated by the comics code,” etc. However, I am among the select few (and there might be many more of us, not sure here) who believe that the damnable code actually forced the writers to stretch their creativity to its absolute limits to tell stories that the comics code approved of but that readers also enjoyed. And what did we get from all the mental loop-de-loops and brain sweat by the architects of the Silver Age? Ridiculously powerful characters? Check. (Superman playing billiards with a giant pool cue and a dozen or so PLANETS). Unbelievable storylines and character motivations? Check. (The Fantastic Four going to Hollywood to work for Namor the movie mogul or Lois Lane’s earth-threatening attempts to get Superman to marry her). Science fiction? Check. (Green Lantern as a cosmic cop powered by the super-science of the Guardians or The Flash using physics to defeat most of his foes). So I repeat: What’s not to love? Of course we got a little less violence and punch-ups in those pages, but the massive fecundity of ideas was the main attraction as far as I’m concerned. And one of the most wondrous aspects of the Silver Age was the Time Travel Yarn.

Whether it was Superboy hurtling back through time to stop the assassination of Abe Lincoln or The Flash utilizing his cosmic treadmill to visit far-future worlds, time travel seemed to be pure imaginative gold during the post-atomic age, leaving the father of time travel H.G Wells in the dust. One of my favorite yarns involving traversing the time barrier came from Fantastic Four #5 where Reed, Ben, Sue and Johnny travel back to the days of Pirates on the high seas via Dr. Doom’s ‘time panels.’ There Ben dons the disguise of Blackbeard and learns that he actually WAS the real Blackbeard when the FF eventually return to their own time.

The best Time Travel stories though, happened when Superboy jetted off to the 30th century to join up with The Legion of Super-heroes, the club of Super-Teens from the future that had recruited him in the past to thank him for being their inspiration. Glimpsing the earth and humanity’s galactic expansion in these comics did more for my imagination than any of the great sci-fi authors I was reading at the time. Wouldn’t anyone like to zoom around a futuristic metropolis courtesy of a flight ring, or travel to the far reaches of the galaxy via universal tourism? Learn an intergalactic language through holo-machines? No problem. Date an attractive alien (humanoid girl)? Definitely in the cards. The possibilities were virtually limitless…and the Silver Age had so much more to offer than just time travel.

Granted, some stories became pretty ridiculous. Lois Lane’s visit to Krypton in the past to smooch Superman as a baby is a case in point. Yet even these moments of supreme insanity from the writers resulted in nothing but pure unadulterated fun for me as a kid. I used to read The Flash solely for the fact that any given tale might involve him using his speed to shatter the time barrier and battle some futuristic terror. And tales such as “Superman under The Red Sun” from Action Comics #300, arguably one of the greatest comic book time travel tales ever, made me aware of just how terrifying a post-apocalyptic world might be.

So what happened? Where did the silver age of time travel finally start to unravel? Was it during the bronze age of comics when the limited series Crisis of Infinite Earths shook up the DCU, after which Superman and The Flash were revamped and depowered? No longer could any DC character jaunt through time under his/her own steam, effectively sending the Legion of Super-heroes into isolation. At least Marvel still exhibited some fascination with the concept when Chris Claremont and John Byrne tackled one of the seminal X-Men time travel stories in “X-Men: Days of Future Past.” And the X-Men movie from 2014 under the same name briefly reinvigorated the public’s fascination with the classic time travel yarn.

But even stories like “Days of Future Past” is a far cry from the silver age of goodness and raw creativity. Sure, time travel stories have been attempted since then, but none of them (at least in my mind) have captured the sense of fun and reckless story genesis that the writers who struggled under the comics code poured onto the page. So bring back the Silver Age (minus the comics code, of course) or take a cue from comics scribe Grant Morrison, who excels at capturing that sense of wonder us post-atomic kids still crave. And would someone please tell a good time travel comic book yarn, for Rao’s sake. Is that honestly too much to ask for?