Ancient minor mystery solved

[bunsen_h]

For a long time now, I've been trying to identify the first comic book that I ever owned.  I've asked around, posted in newsgroups, etc., without success.  Here's what I wrote in a newsgroup message in August 1993:

Greetings!  As a result of an ongoing discussion in sci.physics, I'm
trying to track down a comic book that I read about twenty years ago.
Strange the way these things work out...

The comic was in the heroic-adventure sci-fi line -- and I use the term
"sci-fi" here with its full load of negative connotations.  Our team of
adventurers ended up travelling backwards in time, and this involved the
conversion of Time into a sort of reddish dust in their spaceship.  The
return trip forwards in time required the reconversion of this powdered
Time back into its normal form.

The star drive units on this ship were rounded in front, tapering conically
in back.  They worked by absorbing random light in the rounded part and
spitting it out in coherent form from the conical tip in back.  The comic
also mentioned Einstein's mass/energy conversion equation, my first
exposure to it.

The comic book included a page called "BackTalk", which (as I recall)
involved the editor coming up with stupid answers to equally stupid
reader questions.

Can anyone help me track this one down?  I'm guessing that the book would
have been published somewhere around 1970.  This is estimated on the basis
of my probably being about eight years old at the time, and the book was
somewhat tattered and slightly yellowed.  It was my very first comic
book, a gift from some kid whose house we were visiting.

Thanks for any info.
 

Yesterday evening, I referred back to that ancient mystery in a follow-up to a different story-ID request.  And this time, finally, someone came through!

It's an issue of Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, a weird science-fiction comic apparently published for the Catholic Church and distributed primarily to students at Catholic schools.  Which goes some way towards explaining why I wasn't having a lot of luck tracking it down.

It's interesting to note what I've remembered and what I've forgotten about it, in the nearly-40-years since I read it.  Many of the details of the "science" and "technology" are pretty clear, as is the overall appearance of the space ship (with its ice-cream-cone-shaped  engines) and the nature of the letter column.  I don't remember much about the people, nothing about the plot with the aliens remains with me, and that bizarre cover doesn't look remotely familiar.  The guy who tracked the thing down suggested that my old copy might not have had its cover, and that's certainly a possibility.

Getting that little mystery solved was a nice event in a day that was, in other respects, remarkably crappy.

Comments

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's obscure! Congratulations on the identification of it.