ROGER KONING
Real Name: Roger Koning
Identity/Class: Human technology-user
Occupation: Playboy; time traveler
Group Membership: None
Affiliations: Alvin Sultan
Enemies: The Koning family (unintentionally)
Known Relatives: Mr. Koning (paternal great great grandfather,
first name unrevealed, deceased);
Mr. Koning (paternal great grandfather, first name
unrevealed, formerly deceased, now apparently erased from history);
Mr. Koning (paternal
grandfather, first name unrevealed, formerly deceased, now apparently erased from history);
Mr. Koning (father, first name unrevealed, formerly deceased, now apparently erased from history);
Mrs. Koning (maiden name unrevealed, formerly Roger's mother and deceased, now never
married to Roger's now-erased father and may no longer be deceased)
Aliases: None
Base of Operations: A mansion in an unidentified city located somewhere in the United States of America
First Appearance: Mystical Tales#7 (June, 1957)
Powers/Abilities: None
Height: 6' (guess)
Weight: Unrevealed
Eye color: Unrevealed
Hair color: Light brown
History:
(Mystical Comics#7/4 (fb) - BTS) - Born in the 1930s (or the late 1920s), Roger Koning was
the latest member of the Koning family who had lived in a certain unspecified area of the United States
of America for over one hundred years.
(Mystical Comics#7/4 (fb) - BTS) - As (presumably) a teenager, Roger attended an unidentified university where he first met Alvin "Al" Sultan. Although the two young men had personalities that contrasted as sharply as black and white, they became friends and remained friends after Roger was expelled in his last year.
(Mystical Comics#7/4 (fb) - BTS) - At some point, presumably after the death of his father (or both his parents), Roger received an inheritance of the mansion which his family had owned for over one hundred years and certain unspecified investments that generated an annual income of $17,000 per year.
(Mystical Comics#7/4 (fb) - BTS) - Despite this adequate (for the 1950s) inheritance, Roger chose to live beyond his means as an irresponsible playboy.
(Mystical Comics#7/4 (fb) - BTS) <1957> - One day, Roger visited Alvin at the laboratory where he worked. Alvin showed Roger his new invention, a time device, and explained how it was operated.
(Mystical Comics#7/4) - Roger listened quietly as Alvin explained that his time device made
it possible for someone to move forward or backward in time and that he had so far only tried going back
one week. When Alvin said that he was next going to go back one hundred years, Roger replied, "Who'd want
to go back a hundred years? They didn't even have night clubs or sports car races then!" Roger then had
a thought that made him get serious, and he expressed that thought to Alvin, saying, "Come to think of
it, if I went back one hundred years, I could advise my great great grandfather on certain investments!
Then my inheritance could be more than just a house and seventeen thousand a year!"
Alvin rejected that idea, stating that he hadn't invented the device for selfish purposes but for historical research. When Roger persisted, saying, "Al, I've got to have this device!" Alvin called him crazy, declared that he wasn't going to let such a dangerous weapon get into the hands of an irresponsible playboy like Roger and told Roger that he had better leave. Roger complied with Alvin's demand and left, but he didn't go far. Instead, he hid nearby and waited for Alvin to leave the laboratory, then pried a window open, entered the laboratory, stole the time device, placed it in the back seat of his sports car and drove it home to his mansion.
After installing the time device in his attic, Roger gathered an adequate amount of canned goods and brought them to the attic. Recalling what Alvin had told him, Roger turned on the machine which then bombarded him with the right amount of atomic radiation to make him live backwards. The device functioned as described and Roger did begin to live backwards and at an ever-increasing rate of speed.
On the first day, Roger slept for four hours, then ate, and then slept again. By the end of his first day living backwards, he had traveled two days back in time. During his second day, Roger traveled a further three days back in time, and during his third day Roger traveled another three days back in time, placing him nine days in the past. Although the process was long and tedious, Roger eventually succeeded in going back one hundred years in time (see comments).
(Mystical Comics#7/4) <1857> - After (presumably) turning off the time device, Roger observed that the attic looked newer and the landscape he could see outside of the building looked different, and he assumed that he had reached his destination. At that moment, the attic door flew open and a man entered, demanding to know what Roger was doing in his house. Roger replied, "Your house? What do you mean your house? This is my house!" The man reacted to this claim by declaring that Roger was a liar as well as an intruder and stated that he knew how to deal with Roger. Both men immediately leapt at one another and began struggling furiously. Roger soon began to feel that he was getting the worst of the fight so he grabbed an iron bar and viciously swung it at the man, causing an unspecified injury (presumably to the head) that was almost instantly fatal.
As he stood over the dead body on the floor of the attic, Roger thought
to himself that the law couldn't do anything to him because the man had been an intruder in his house.
Only then did Roger remember that, since it was 1857, the house wouldn't be his for another hundred years.
Roger then realized that the man he had killed must have really been the owner and was therefore his great-great grandfather.
Fearing that he could not explain the situation to the law, Roger decided to go back to 1957 where the law couldn't get him but then realized that, if the man he had killed was his great great grandfather, then he was a young man and hadn't been married yet. This meant that Roger's great grandfather wouldn't be born and neither would his grandfather or his father or Roger himself. Roger was horrified to realize that he couldn't go back because he no longer existed in the future, and that this meant that he would have to stay in the past and take his punishment because the future couldn't exist for him any more!
Comments: Created by Frank Bolle and ???
On October 13, 2022, Snood posted his profile on the time machine of Charles Czarkowski. I read the profile and noticed the LONG list of other time machines listed in the Clarifications. Then, on October 15, I was scanning pages from Marvel Chillers#1 that were about Modred the Mystic's initial interaction with the Darkhold when I noticed that there was a second story in that issue, a reprint of a three-page story from Mystical Tales#7 that involved a time machine. Finding that story while Snood's list was still so fresh in my mind inspired me to write this profile so, since I had the comic out already, I scanned those pages as well. And the rest is, dare I say it, history.
This three-page short story begins with a single-sentence preface and the title. They're presented like this:
Roger Koning did something no other living man ever did...He stood face
to face with his own ancestor!
IT HAPPENED
in the ATTIC!
In the story, the title looks better because its thick black letters outlined by red, but I don't know how to reproduce that effect here. Anyway, although I'd seen and read the title, it was not until I had almost completed this profile that I noticed and read that preface. It's weird what one can overlook, isn't it?
Having said that, another thing that happened as I was completing this profile was that I suddenly realized that the story did not contain any specific references to the years "1957" or "1857" and that meant that I had always only assumed that the present-day scenes in which Roger Koning interacts with Alvin Sultan and steals his time device took place in the year of publication, 1957. I spent some minutes writing out a paragraph to explain this and it was only after I had finished it that I thought of rereading the story to confirm that no specific years were referenced. Sure enough, while 1957 is never mentioned, once he's in the past, Roger does think to himself, "This is 1857..." So, basically, I was trying to fix a problem that didn't actually exist. Worse yet, it was the second time it had happened to me while writing this profile. At one point, after having taken a break, I returned to working on this profile and suddenly realized that I had only assumed that the ancestor that Roger killed was a Koning. I was about to rewrite Roger's list of relatives when I noticed that Roger does specifically think to himself that killing his ancestor had prevented three subsequent generations of his direct male ancestors from ever having been born...meaning that they were all Konings after all.
Clearly, the lesson to be learned here is to not make assumptions about what facts one thinks are contained within a story, especially when it's so easy to just reread the story and check to see if a realization one has suddenly had is valid or not.
The copy of "It Happened in the Attic!" that I read was a reprint that was the second story in Marvel Chillers#1. There were no credits visible in the three-page story but I searched online and found some websites that mentioned that Frank Bolle was the artist. However, I have no clue as to who wrote it.
"It Happened in the Attic!" was the fourth story (out of seven) that was first published in Mystical Tales#7 (June, 1957). Since I have been unable to determine exactly what the actual page numbers in that issue were, I have chosen to use the page numbers from the reprint in Marvel Chillers#1 which I have chosen to list as the source of the images. Accordingly, pages #17-18-19 from Marvel Chillers#1 are pages X-Y-Z from Mystical Tales#7.
There are only seventeen panels in the three-page story but, despite not using three of them, this profile still manages to contain nineteen images. This is because, while ten panels were the source of only one image each, parts of the other four panels were used to generate nine of the images in this profile.
For anyone who's interested, the three consecutive panels that I've chosen to omit (panels 1-3 on page 2) depict the following scenes: First, Roger is shown lurking in the shadows nearby as he watches Sultan leave the laboratory. Second. Roger is shown climbing into the laboratory through the window that he had just pried open. And third, Roger is shown driving his (open-top) sports car home to his mansion with the time device sitting in the back seat. I suppose that a case could be made for writing a sub-profile about Roger's sports car, but I'm not inclined to do so at this time.
This story was probably inspired by the logical paradox known as the grandfather paradox, a potential logical problem that would arise if a person were to travel to a past time and kill their grandfather before he sired any children. Since this action would have prevented both the time traveler and their parent from ever existing, it would follow that the time traveler would therefore never have existed and thus could not have traveled back in time to kill their grandfather. However, this would in turn mean that their grandfather was not killed and so the time traveler was born and was thus able to travel back in time to kill their grandfather, setting the whole sequence of events in motion again.
Although this is a somewhat interesting story, it does have its problems. Some of them are presumably due to the fact that, being only three pages long, there simply wasn't enough room to provide an explanation. As a result, this story leaves its readers with a number of unanswered questions, some trivial but others less so.
First, although Roger made sure to supply himself with "an adequate amount of canned goods" for his trip, what about other things that he would have needed on his long journey into the past? He would have needed water, for drinking and bathing and (possibly) washing his clothes. Alternatively, assuming that he didn't want to waste water by using it to wash his clothes, he would have needed to bring along multiple changes of clothes. And then there's the question of the solid and liquid waste products that would be generated by everything that he ate and drank during his trip. What did he do with them? Did he keep them with him (in some type of containers) as he traveled back in time? Or did he just dispose of them, maybe by throwing them outside the field generated by the time device? If the former, then he would have had a very large number of filled containers by the time his trip ended and if the latter, then one would expect that the repeated mysterious appearances of fecal matter and urine in the attic might have been noticed over the course of the century.
Second, there is a MAJOR problem with how quickly Alvin's time
device moved it and its passengers backward in time. The Omniscient Narrative specifically states that,
on his first day, Roger lived two days in one, that he lived three days in one on his second day and that
at the end of three days he had gone back in time (a total of) nine days. Since 9 - (2 + 3) = 4, we can
conclude that, on his third day, Roger lived four days in one. Using these figures, we can calculate that,
when in continuous operation, the speed of time travel on day "n" must have been (n + 1) days backwards
for every 24 hours of travel time. So, in order to travel 100 years (or 36,525 days) into the past, a
traveler would have had to live through 269 "backwards days" before reaching their destination (by
traveling 36,584 days into the past) with the last 270 days having been traveled on his last backwards
day. That's a period of almost NINE MONTHS that Roger would have had to have spent alone in that
attic.
On the other hand, maybe that unidentified writer just chose his words poorly and he meant
to write that, at the end of three days, Roger had gone back in time another nine days. This would mean
that, by living backwards for three days, Roger had traveled a total of 14 days into the past. If the
speed with which the time device traveled into the past did increase far more rapidly than what was
written, then Roger's total travel time would have been significantly shorter than I had calculated. For
example, if the speed on day "n" was something like n-squared (n x n), then it would have taken Roger
only 48 days to travel 38,024 days into the past. However, even with such an acceleration in the speed
of his time traveling, that would still mean that Roger would have had to spend weeks in the attic and
I strongly suspect that he would have gone stir-crazy up in the attic with nothing to do except eat and
drink and sleep and excrete waste.
Third, there's the question of how Roger and the time device would
have interacted with objects in the past while traveling backwards in time. Although many forms of time
travel (like Doctor Doom's Time Platform) seem to instantly transport their passengers to the desired
time while others require that the travelers actually fly through the timestream, Sultan's device
instead functioned by apparently reversing the direction in which time flowed around it, enabling Roger
and the device to exist backwards. I've presumed that, although it wasn't depicted in the story, the
time device and everything affected by it would have been placed into some sort of extra-temporal state
which rendered them both invisible and intangible to anyone who might have been in the attic in the past
century. Since they were, in a sense, not really there, they could not interact with anything that was
not also reversed in time. As such, Roger wouldn't have had to worry about the danger of possibly existing
in the exact same location as a solid object for the duration of his trip. Of course, once he'd reached
his destination and turned off the machine, Roger must have had enough common sense to take care to make
sure that he wasn't partially or fully within some past object when he stopped traveling backwards. Or
maybe he didn't even realize the risk and just got lucky?
Also, the fact that the story makes no mention of how Roger perceived his surroundings
as he lived backwards in time suggests that he saw things normally. However, a probable exception would
be that everything that he saw move within the attic, aside from the objects that were traveling backwards
along with him, would have been moving in reverse and at faster speeds than they were actually moving in
non-reversed time.
Of course, given that he could apparently see anything at all indicates that, although
he was intangible to everything that was unaffected by the time field, photons from outside the time
field could still be detected by the photoreceptive cells of his retinas. This would account for why
he apparently did not perceive himself as being completely surrounded by total darkness while on his
time trip.
Fourth, Alvin Sultan claimed that he had gone back in time one week but he didn't state how he returned from the past. Did he use his time device to travel forward in time until he had gotten back to his starting point? Or did he decide to travel forward through time in the normal fashion and secretly co-exist with his past self for that week? Given his concern about how dangerous his device could be, I strongly suspect that he would not have risked altering the past by staying there for any length of time and that he would have been especially concerned about not leaving his time device in the past. It also seems likely that he would have conducted his test run somewhere other than in the laboratory where he worked, probably at some isolated location where he could be certain that nobody, not even his past self, would encounter him during his visit to the past.
Fifth, why is it that the three people in this story all exhibited impaired judgment? I suppose that the Mr. Koning from 1857 could be considered normal, even though the fact that he was foolish enough to attack the intruder he found in his house without first summoning help led to him being killed in the fight, but what about the other two? Roger Koning was definitely the most lacking in common sense, making a great effort to travel back in time to meet his ancestor only to immediately forget that the house in the past would necessarily be owned by that very ancestor, but Alvin Sultan also seemed to have a problem with critical thinking. Not only did he tell someone he considered to be an "irresponsible playboy" all about something he considered to be "a dangerous weapon" and how to operate it, he also ignored the fact that said playboy was VERY interested in obtaining the time device which he then left in his very insecure laboratory from which it was very easily stolen. If I were to assign responsibility for how very badly things turned out, I'd hold Alvin almost as much to blame as Roger was. Sure, it was Roger who acted on his selfish desires but Alvin could have easily prevented the entire mess if he had just realized the potential consequences before telling his friend about his very dangerous new invention.
Finally, what exactly was Roger's situation at the end of the story?
Was he trapped in the past where he would be forced to take his punishment for killing his ancestor? Or
was he wrong when he assumed that he couldn't go back to 1957 because he no longer existed in the future?
The answer to this question depends upon how time travel works in this story and there are two likely
answers:
I think the default situation in
Marvel is that changing the past diverges an alternate timeline, but
there are certainly situations where the present of -616 has been
altered by time traveling and altering the past. Certainly, if Roger
slew his own ancestor before he had sired any children, the time
paradox who occur, so I think it most likely that Roger's actions
diverged the new reality of Earth-57067. In that reality, the man he
killed had no descendants, but Roger would persist in that reality
because he came from Reality-616, where his ancestors were indeed born.
Roger vanished from -616, and one would suspect that Alvin figured out
the truth.
--Snood
Taking these possibilities into consideration, there is at least a chance (if not a certainty) that Roger Koning would cease to exist if he had used Sultan's time device to return to 1957. However, that doesn't mean that he wouldn't be able to use it to escape the law. While traveling into the future would have been risky, there was nothing to prevent him from using it to travel further into the past, away from the scene of the murder he had committed. As long as he was far away from the Koning mansion on the date in 1857 when its owner was killed by Roger's younger self, Roger would definitely be able to avoid punishment for his crime, especially if he made sure to have witnesses to his whereabouts on that date. Admittedly, it wouldn't be an ideal solution, especially for an irresponsible playboy, since he would be a person who owned nothing but the clothes on his back and had no past history or skills that could help him survive in the past, but he would still be alive and free.
If Roger did surrender to the law and accept his punishment, I wonder how much time he would have spent in prison before he realized that he could have safely escaped into the past instead?
Alternatively, what would have happened if Roger told the authorities about Sultan's time device and could prove that it worked? How would that have affected the post-1857 history of whatever timeline he was in? Maybe those authorities were corrupt people who would have found the time device and Roger's (probably) limited knowledge of future historical events that were to occur in the years between 1857 and 1957 to be useful to their purposes and perhaps valuable enough to reward him with freedom and monetary compensation? Or maybe they would simply have him killed to keep anyone else from learning about the dangerous weapon that they had acquired from him? I guess it would all depend on how enlightened and responsible those Powers That Be were...in the year 1857. You know, back before the American Civil War, before the abolishment of slavery in the USA, and before both the First and Second World Wars, as well as the hundreds of other wars that were fought during that century. Also before all of the scientific, medical and technological discoveries that have changed human civilization (and life on Earth) so very much. How many evil (and good) events would have been prevented by having such foreknowledge?
Or maybe temporal agents working for Immortus or the Time Variance Authority or some other organization would have shown up to silence and/or discredit Roger and retrieve Sultan's time device before history could be disrupted.
One last thought: Maybe the owner of the house in 1857 was not actually
Roger Koning's biological ancestor. After all, Roger didn't seem to recognize him and only assumed that he
must have been his great great grandfather because he owned the house in 1857. However, there are several
ways in which killing this man would not actually erase the Koning family (or Roger's bloodline) from
history:
Okay, these comments have gotten REALLY off track. Time to stop indulging in rampant speculation. Well, maybe just a bit more.
Just before I submitted this profile, it occurred to me that Roger could have used the time device to escape punishment in another way: by removing the evidence of his crime. He could have taken his ancestor's body, used the time device to transport both it and him backwards in time, perhaps to before the mansion was even built, and then left the corpse there in the past while he returned to 1857. Sure, Mr. Koning would have disappeared without a trace, but it seems unlikely that anyone in that time period would have ever suspected time travel was involved. Of course, this solution would have had its own problems. For one, if Roger started traveling backwards in time while still in the attic, would he have materialized in mid-air once he had arrived back before the attic existed? For another, it would have been decidedly unpleaseant for Roger to have to spend days traveling backwards in time with his ancestor's body decomposing in close proximity to him. And finally, since Roger only survived his first journey because he had acquired an adequate amount of canned goods, where would he have gotten the food he needed for another trip?
Credit where credit is due:
In the Clarifications, I mostly just copied the list of time machines that
appeared in the clarifications for Charles Czarkowski's time machine. However, I did add three time machines
that had been overlooked.
The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe's article on Time Travel can be found here.
Profile by Donald Campbell.
CLARIFICATIONS:
Roger Koning has no known connections to:
Alvin Sultan has no known connections to:
Alvin Sultan's time device has no known connections to:
An ancestor of Roger Koning who lived in the 19th century, Mr. Koning lived in a mansion that would have later been inherited by four generations of his descendants. His first name has never been revealed and little was known about his life except for the fact that he was destined to marry sometime after 1857 and to eventually father at least one son who would carry on the Koning name.
However, this destiny was changed one day in 1857 when Mr. Koning, then still an unmarried young man, heard a noise in his attic and went to investigate. After throwing open the attic door, Koning saw a strange man standing there and immediately demanded, "What are you doing in my house?" When the stranger responded by claiming that it was his house, Mr. Koning replied, "Sir...You are a liar, besides an intruder! I know how to deal with you!" The two men then leapt at each other and began struggling furiously. As they fought, Mr. Koning began to get the better of the intruder who, upon realizing this, grabbed an iron bar and viciously swung it at Koning, causing an unspecified injury (presumably to the head) that was almost instantly fatal. Mr. Koning only managed to cry out "OHHH!" before he fell to the attic floor, dead.
With Mr. Koning's death, the destined births of his son, his grandson, his great grandson and his great great grandson Roger (the man who had killed him) were all prevented from happening as they should have.
--Mystical Tales#7/4
The inventor of a time device that was tragically misused, Alvin Sultan was probably born in the 1930s (or the late 1920s). As (presumably) a teenager, Alvin went to an unspecified university where he first met Roger Koning who called him "Al." Although the two young men had personalities that contrasted as sharply as black and white, they became friends and remained friends after Roger was expelled in his last year. Alvin remained at the university and graduated summa cum laude as an electrical engineer, signifying that he had earned his degree with the highest distinction. Alvin was credited with creating several useful inventions but what they were has never been revealed.
At some point, Alvin began working in an unidentified laboratory where, sometime in 1957, he succeeded in creating a device that could move people forward or backward through time. Alvin tested the device by using it to go back in time one week. How he returned to the present from which he had left was not revealed (see comments).
Sometime after making this test run, Alvin was visited in his laboratory by his friend Roger. Alvin described how his new device was operated and concluded by saying, "...I tell you, Roger, it really works! By doing what I just described to you, I can move forward or backward in time! So far I've only tried going back one week...Next I'm going back one hundred years!" Roger was initially dismissive of that idea, asking who would want to go back a hundred years because they hadn't even had night clubs or sports car races then? However, Roger then had an idea and suggested that, if he could go back in time one hundred years, then he could advise his great great grandfather on certain investments and thereby increase his inheritance to more than just the house and the seventeen thousand a year he had received. Alvin immediately rejected this idea, stating, "I didn't invent this device for selfish purposes! It's meant for historical research!" When Roger persisted and stated that he had to have the device, Alvin responded by saying, "You're crazy! I'm not letting such a dangerous weapon get into the hands of an irresponsible playboy like you! I think you'd better leave!" Roger complied with Alvin's demand and left.
That evening, Alvin left the laboratory for the day without noticing that Roger was hiding nearby and waiting for him to leave. Once Alvin had gone, Roger pried a window open, entered the laboratory, stole the time device, placed it in his sports car and drove it home to his mansion.
--Mystical Tales#7/4
Note: What happened next depends upon how time travel actually works. On the one hand, if Roger's actions had caused a divergence, then Alvin found that his time device was missing and soon discovered that his friend Roger Koning had also disappeared. On the other hand, if the change Roger made was absorbed by the timestream, then the time device was still in Alvin's laboratory because the friend to whom Alvin had revealed its existence had retroactively ceased to exist.
A device capable of moving a person forward or backward through time that was invented by Alvin Sultan in 1957. Aside from the fact that it could generate "atomic radiation" that could cause itself and people and/or objects close to it to "live backwards" through time or to travel forward in time at a speed faster than the normal passage of time, nothing has been revealed about it. However, based on what was seen of it while it was being used by Roger Koning, its unrevealed power source was apparently contained within it.
The time device somewhat resembled a large desktop computer, having a cuboid shape that seemed to be less than two feet long, wide and tall, but its height was less than its width or its length. It was light enough to be supported by a simple desk and could be carried by a single adult human male. There were a number of dials and buttons that presumably controlled it, but exactly what each control did was never revealed.
Unlike time travel vehicles that transported their passengers through time or time travel machines that remained stationary while projecting people across time, this device was able to generate a field that reversed the flow of time within it and it then traveled back in time as time flowed backwards, taking anything within a certain range along with it. Given that it lacked any sort of external structure within which the atomic radiation that reversed the flow of time could be contained, it is unclear why only certain objects (like the device, the travelers, their clothing and their supplies) were affected by the reverse time field while other objects that were exposed to the radiation (like the floor, the walls and everything else in the room) did not also begin to exist backwards in time.
The time device was never depicted moving forward in time but it probably did so in a similar manner to how it moved backwards in time, presumably by enabling those near it to travel into the future at a faster rate than the normal flow of time would have carried them. As with the backwards time travel, this forward time travel probably enabled to traveler to move multiple days into the future while only living through a much shorter period of time within the time field, and the speed at which the device traveled into the future probably increased the longer that it was activated.
It's possible that this forward time travel could only be used to
counteract backwards time travel that had been accomplished by using the time device. If so, then the
machine would not be able to travel further into the future beyond the point at which it had begun to
generate a reverse time field.
However, this is only speculation and there is no evidence that the time
device had such a limitation.
Once activated, the time device would presumably continue to generate the atomic radiation that would move it forward or backward in time until it was either turned off or the power source became depleted. If a traveler were to move outside of the range of the time field, then he or she would presumably just re-enter normal time while the time device, now lacking an operator, would continue to travel either backwards to the beginning of time or forward to the end of time until it ran out of power.
While traveling through time, the time device remained at the same geographical location on the planet Earth. It would presumably only change its location if it were physically carried by someone or something who were within the time field with it. However, this ability to be relocated while functioning has never been observed.
Invented by Alvin Sultan in 1957, the time device was used by him to travel one week back in time but nothing else about this time trip have been revealed. Sultan may or may not have used the time device to return to the present from which he had left. Sultan was planning on using the time device to go back one hundred years when he told his friend Roger Koning about it. Although Koning initially did not see any value in traveling back in time, he soon realized that he could use it to increase his inheritance by going back one hundred years and advising his ancestor to make certain investments. Sultan refused to let it be used for such a selfish reason and when Koning insisted that he had to have the device, Sultan called him crazy, said he would not let such a dangerous weapon get into the hands of an irresponsible playboy like Koning, and demanded that he leave. Koning left the laboratory but remained nearby, waiting in hiding until he saw Sultan leave, and then he pried a window open, let himself in and stole the device.
Koning placed the time device in the back seat of his sport car and drove to his mansion where he then brought the device to the attic. Then, after stocking up with an adequate supply of canned goods, Koning recalled what Sultan had told him about how to control the time device and turned it on. Once it was activated, the time device began to emit the atomic radiation that caused it, and Koning and certain objects near it to exist "backwards" in time. After operating for an unspecified time, the time device and everything that it had carried along with it were one hundred years in the past. Seeing that he had apparently reached his intended destination of 1857, Koning then shut off the time device. However, only seconds later, Koning was confronted by the house's owner and the two men got into a violent struggle that ended with the owner's death. Realizing that he had killed his own ancestor and that the killing was thus unjustified, Koning briefly considered using the time device to return to 1957 but then realized that, by killing his young, unmarried ancestor, he had retroactively prevented four generations of Konings, including himself, from being born.
--Mystical Tales#7/4
Note: What happened to the time device after Roger Koning came to believe that he couldn't use it to return to 1957 has never been revealed. It might have been destroyed in 1857. Or it might be sitting in storage somewhere, just waiting for some unwitting person to turn it on.
Alternatively, if Roger's actions did retroactively prevent him from existing in 1957, then his actions in that future, including his theft of the time device, might have also been retroactively erased from history. In that case, the time device might have just disappeared from the Koning mansion in 1857 and reappeared in its original position in Sultan's laboratory in 1957.
The attic in the Koning mansion was where Roger Koning lived backwards through time for one hundred years. Despite the presence of the sloping ceilings which indicated that the mansion had a slanted (probably gabled) roof, the attic was fairly spacious. There was (at least) one large window that was part of a dormer that projected vertically beyond the plane of the roof. Looking out the window gave one a good view of the grounds of the estate.
Although the rafters and the sheathing were made of wood, there was also at least one wall and (possibly) a chimney that were made of either bricks or stone.
The electrification of the attic presumably took place at the same time as the necessary wiring was installed in the rest of the mansion.
The attic could be reached by a staircase that led up from a lower floor (as opposed to a ladder that would have led to a trapdoor). Judging by the handrail and balusters that could be seen behind Mr. Koning as he entered the attic, the top of the staircase ended at a wall with a door which opened inward into the attic space. Oddly, this entryway seems to be situated within the attic, since the brick wall visible in the panel in which Mr. Koning enters the attic is clearly further in the background than the wall in which the door through which Mr. Koning had just entered the attic is located.
While the contents of the attic were different in the two time periods, the Koning family seems to have consistently used it primarily for storage instead of as living space. Among the items seen in the attic in 1857 were (in order of appearance): a (kerosene) lamp (with a glass globe) near the window; a desk, a rolled up and tied brown rug leaning against a brick wall; several framed pictures (some hanging on at least two walls and some on the floor, leaning against other walls or items); at least two chests of drawers; what looks like part of the headboard of a brass bed; a smaller lamp with a glass chimney; a purple trunk; a red round box (possibly a hat box); a red pillow; a pale blue hanging curtain; an empty picture frame attached to the blue curtain; a full-length floor-standing mirror mounted in a frame; a rocking chair; a broom; a rolled up and tied bundle on the floor (possibly a blue rug); and the "iron bar" (that looks like fireplace poker) that Roger used to kill his ancestor.
In 1957, the attic was seen to contain the following items: a pendant ceiling lamp with an incandescent light bulb and a shade; a table and a chair; a desk lamp (presumably also electric); and framed pictures leaning against the walls. There were also those items that Roger presumably brought to the attic himself, including the canned goods he intended to eat while he lived backwards in time, a bed on which he slept, a coffee pot, and what might have been a small portable stove on which to heat his food.
And that's probably more than anyone needs or wants to know about this particular attic.
--Mystical Tales#7/4
Notes: In retrospect, most of the information I've included in this subprofile is completely unnecessary. That means that this profile could have been completed months ago if I hadn't wasted a LOT of time by putting off finishing this subprofile for as long as I did. Hindsight.
My main motivation for writing this subprofile was that I wanted to use a rearranged version of the story's title as its title. However, the fact that most of the story (11 panels out of 17) takes place within the attic means that it probably does merit its own subprofile anyway.
images: (without ads)
Marvel Chillers#1, page 17, panel 1 (main image)
page 17, panel 3 (Roger Koning - head shot)
page 17, panel 2 (Roger and Alvin)
page 18, panel 5 (Roger "living backwards" in the attic)
page 19, panel 1 (Roger making a stupid mistake)
page 19, panel 2 (Roger and his ancestor fighting)
page 19, panel 3 (Roger striking a fatal blow)
page 19, panel 4 (Roger realizing who he's just killed)
page 19, panel 5 (Roger planning to flee back to 1957)
page 19, panels 6-7 (Roger realizing that he's trapped in the past)
page 18, panel 7 (Mr. Koning confronting an intruder in his attic)
page 19, panel 4 (Mr. Koning lying dead on his attic floor)
page 17, panel 1 (Alvin Sultan - full body)
page 17, panel 3 (Alvin Sultan - head shot)
page 17, panel 1 (Alvin Sultan's time device)
page 18, panel 5 (time device in operation)
page 18, panel 4 (the attic in 1957)
page 18, panel 6 (the attic in "1857")
Appearances:
Mystical Tales#7 (June, 1957) - Frank Bolle (artist)
Reprinted in Marvel Chillers#1 (October, 1975)
First Posted: 06/04/2024
Last updated: 06/04/2024
Any Additions/Corrections? Please let me know.
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