TRULY GONE AND FORGOTTEN : TIMMY TIME

Technically, pretty much everybody comes out of yesterday into today.

It’s only just occurred to me, and I have no idea how to check, but I wonder if any other comic book character has been the starring figure in as many distinct comic volumes as Richie Rich has. The long-running, exceptionally popular Harvey kids’ character has, of course, starred in his own eponymous title, plus a shelf-full of additional titles where the “S” is always replaced with a dollar sign and the “C” is always a cents – Million$, Gem$, $u¢¢e$$ $torie$, Dollar$ and ¢ent$, ¢a$h, ¢a$h Money, Big Bu¢k$, Billion$, Zillion$, Fortune$, Ja¢kpot$, Bit¢oins, ¢rypto¢urren¢y , Paid In $to¢k and ¢ompany-Mat¢hed 401K ¢ontribution$, just to name a few and make up a few others.

This doesn’t count all the (shall we say) lightly off-genre Richie Rich comics, like Vault of Mystery and SuperRichie, or the multitude of team-ups, from those with his own staff  - Richie Rich and Irona, Richie Rich and Cadbury, …and Dollar, …and Professor Keenbean, etc – and other Harvey comics denizens from Casper to Little Dot to Billy Bellhops and Jackie Jokerz.

And then there’s Timmy Time! A weird combination of straight – if a little simple – science fiction adventure with Richie Rich’s big-headed, fat-footed comic nonsense, the end product of which came out as a single issue in 1977, “Richie Rich Meets Timmy Time”. Even if the issue’s art were uncredited, you can tell it’s Ernie Colon from a mile away, as the then-Harvey regular was obviously stretching his wings a little in anticipation of his highly regarded adventure titles to come from other publishers down the line (Damage Control, Amethyst and Arak coming to mind in particular).

Whoa, that is NOT appropriate, green penis bot!

The time-travelling Timmy is the product of the far, far, distant, so-far-away, incredibly remote, can’t-even-fathom-it, good-lord-will-man-even-survive future of 2019, which I think makes him a Millennial. Timmy Time grew up in a post-9/11 world. He also grew up in a world where space travel between the planets of the solar system is common and mankind is apparently under assault from the alien menace of floating green time-travelling robots who kind of look like grinning penises.

While the ship carrying his family to Mars comes under attack, Timmy “heroically” absconds in a liferaft (Okay, I’ll be fair, he’s doing it as part of a desperate bid to save his ship) and subsequently befriends a brain-damaged alien invader who’s now hella stupid and altruistic. Whatever Harvey’s message is, I don’t want to know.

The robot’s time-travelling powers take Timmy to the prehistoric origins of mankind, and to a beach where Richie Rich is getting hectored by Gloria because he’s too rich sometimes, you know? I get yelled at for the exact same thing. The Poor Little Rich Boy of the title doesn’t do much to help Timmy along on his adventure, and the crossover really was for the sake of justifying the title of the book (since the rest of the issue is dedicated to sort-of sci-fi stories featuring the regular Harvey Comics crew).

Timmy saves his family and their ship, but they may as well have died in the vacuum of eternal nothingness because he never showed up again, the end.

Is that a promise or a threat, do you think?