The latest installment of Scott Shaw’s Oddball Comics focuses on the May, 1960 issue of My Greatest Adventure, one of DC’s anthology comic books of science-fiction shorts.

Included in the issue are such stories as “We Were Ruled By The Emperor-Beast,” “I Fought The Sonar Creatures,” “I Became A Human Space Ship,” and more, featuring bizarre invading aliens, an atomic transmutator that converts sounds into colors and force, and a tunnel through the center of the Earth that manages to ignore the existence of the planet’s molten core.

In other words, really bad science fiction. And yet also somehow quite lovable. In fact, much of yesterday’s bad science fiction has become strangely lovable.

Which led me to think—if yesterday’s bad SF can become lovable, does that mean that contemporary bad SF, the wretched stuff that offends me so today, will someday seem lovable in retrospect, too?

It’s possible. But yesterday’s bad SF had some things going for it which today’s bad SF does not.

Yesterday’s bad SF was naive. Today’s bad SF is mercenary.

Yesterday’s bad SF was primitive. Today’s bad SF is polished.

Time alone won’t erase those differences. Still, I’m willing to consider that some sort of nostalgic metamorphosis will occur anyway. Unfortunately, using the passage of time since the publication of My Greatest Adventure #43 as an template, I guess I’ll have to check back in 48 years to see the result …