13 Comic Stories Featuring Time Travelers Visiting the Day of Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination
1. “The Impossible Mission!” (Superboy #85, 1960)
“Hey, how come all those superheroes who can travel through time haven’t gone back to stop one of history’s greatest tragedies?” Who says they haven’t tried? “The Impossible Mission!” begins with young Clark and his parents attending Smallville’s annual “Abraham Lincoln Day” when Clark gets an idea. “My mission… to prevent the assassination of Abraham Lincoln!” he muses to himself. “I’m know it’s impossible to change fate — but I’m trying to try my utmost!” After achieving fantastic speeds that allow him to travel through time as easily as you or I might get off the couch and travel to the refrigerator, he spirits himself to April 14, 1865, to warn the president of the attempt on his life. But wouldn’t you know it — the “Mr. L.” he finds in a hotel room is actually Lex Luthor, who’s hiding in the past from Superboy’s future adult self. No worries, though, because a piece of red kryptonite that Luthor keeps on him for just these occasions will work just as well on the Lad of Steel. With Superboy immobilized by the Red K, Luthor gloats at his good fortune… until the commotion outside alerts him to the fact that Lincoln was just shot, and that he prevented Superboy from saving Lincoln’s life. After Luthor flees and Superboy regains his mobility, we end the story with a present-day Clark at the Lincoln Memorial to say welp, I tried. But… did you, though? Why was saving Lincoln a one-time deal? For that matter, why is Luthor so broken up about this? You can both travel through time, guys. Do DC characters just not believe in do-overs?
2. “Superman’s Greatest Feats!” (Superman #146, 1961)
Years later — at least by how Superman measures time — Earth’s greatest hero would discover the answer to why it’s futile to try and change events in the past. After a telepathic SOS from his former mermaid sweetheart (no, really) alerts him to the imminent destruction of Atlantis, he zooms over to take care of the danger when he gets an idea: why not fly back in time to prevent Atlantis from sinking in the first place? Having successfully completed that mission, Superman grows drunk with temporal power and decides to zip around history saving lives, from a bunch of Christian martyrs in ancient Rome to Nathan Hale to General Custer’s regiment to Mr. Lincoln himself. Now convinced he is like unto a god, Superman sets his sights on the big one: preventing the deaths of everyone on Krypton by building a fleet of rocket ships and sending them back into the past to his father on Krypton. But then he spies himself as a baby exiting one of the ships in the arms of his parents and realizes something is messed up because he can’t be present in the same time as both a child and an adult. A quick trip back to the present clears up the mystery: Superman didn’t really change history, but instead accidentally created a “twin universe” where Lincoln lived and Krypton’s inhabitants survived to make Earth their new home. Whoops. Let’s just say it’s a good thing for him the TVA concerns itself with sacred timelines in some other universe.
3. “The Bizarro Who Goofed Up History!” (Adventure Comics #297, 1962)
Following his first appearance in 1958, Bizarro proved popular enough to land his own strip, “Tales of the Bizarro World,” which ran in DC’s Adventure Comics between 1961 and 1962. The running joke of the strip was that Bizarro and everyone else on Bizarro World aren’t too bright and do everything backwards (They wear evening gowns in the pool! Their welcome mats say “SCRAM”! Cats chase dogs up trees! And so forth.) with Bizarro No. 1 occasionally getting himself into wacky situations, a sharp turn away from his original depiction as a somewhat tragic Frankenstein-like monster. In this story, he has a dream where he goes back to Earth and mucks around in history for no other reason than the lulz; he fixes it so that two brothers with the surname Wrong are the first to fly a place (get it?), changes things so that Isaac Newton invents Fig Newtons instead of discovering gravity, and thwarts John Wilkes Booth when he tries to assassinate Lincoln… only he does it by flying Booth back in time to accidentally assassinate George Washington instead. Oh, Bizarro. Good thing it’s all just a dream (or am it…???).
4. “The Assassins” (The Time Tunnel #1, 1967)
Debuting September 9, 1966 — just one day after Star Trek began its own not-quite-five-year voyage — ABC’s The Time Tunnel introduced viewers to a team of scientists who create a top-secret time machine for the U.S. government. When something goes wrong, two of them end up “lost in the swirling maze of past and future ages”; the rest of the series follows their adventures as they try to find their way back home with the help of their colleagues in the present. Though the show only lasted for one season, that was long enough to send our heroes to all sorts of times and places: the Titanic, the fall of the Alamo, the Battle of Jericho, Arthurian England, and Baltimore in 1861, where (in the episode “The Death Trap”) they become entangled in a plot to assassinate Lincoln on the way to his inauguration. Though they get a chance to speak with the man himself, they don’t offer Lincoln any advice about saving either the Union or himself… but they would get a second chance to save Lincoln, this time in the pages of the Gold Key comic adapting the TV series. Finding themselves in Washington, DC, on April 14, 1865, the two men try to convince the manager at Ford’s Theatre there’s a plot afoot, but they misremember a detail and discredit themselves. This leads to a series of unfortunate events in which they keep trying to warn someone of what’s about to happen and they end up being seen as either crazy or in cahoots with the assassin they’re trying to stop (an impression that isn’t helped by them being forced to follow Booth as he flees from the theater). Fortunately, the Time Tunnel conveniently teleports them away just before they get lynched by an angry mob. Whew!
5. “Jimmy Olsen’s Blackest Deeds!” (Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #110, 1968)
Okay, so maybe it’s a little surprising that a time-traveling Superman tries and fails twice to save Lincoln, and maybe it’s a mite puzzling that two super-smart scientists armed with information from the future couldn’t pull off the simple task of stopping a homicidal actor from committing the deed. But Jimmy Olsen screwing up when it’s his turn to go back and save the nation’s Commander-in-Chief? That totally checks out. What’s even more on brand for Superman’s useless pal? He literally falls asleep on the job even after he spots John Wilkes Booth approaching the stage door. After Jimmy volunteers for a scientist’s experiment, he pulls a Quantum Leap by his mind jumping back in time to occupy the bodies of people from the past who share his “identical genetic patterns.” After hanging out in ancient Rome and medieval England, he shows up at Ford’s Theatre on that fateful night, taking the form of a “Sergeant O’Connell” who’s tasked with guarding the back entrance to the building. Shaken by how his past “twins” all seemed like cowards, traitors, and generally useless at their jobs, Jimmy wakes up in the present deciding the only option left to him is to take the Daily Planet helicopter, fly it to a remote island, and never see anyone ever again. Well, that’s… drastic. Fortunately, this is a DC comic from the 1960s, so you bet Superman is always game for a chance to mind-fuck his “best pal” before revealing everything’s aces. Now, who’s going to tell Perry about that crashed helicopter…?
6. “I’ll Find You In Yesterday!” (The Forever People #7, 1972)
Created by Jack Kirby as part of his “Fourth World” saga, the Forever People were Kirby’s idea of that era’s “flower children” — a group of young New Gods who travel to Earth to oppose Darkseid and his minions, often using their Mother Box to summon the powerful figure known as Infinity Man. And trust me, I have not even begun to scratch the surface of the trippiness contained therein. At one point in their saga, the team is separated and flung into different eras of the past by Darkseid’s Omega beams; the team members known as Mark Moonrider and Beautiful Dreamer land in Ford’s Theatre on the night of Lincoln’s assassination shortly before the play starts. Using Dreamer’s illusion-casting powers to blend in with the locals, they remember the significance of that date and rush to save the president, even confronting John Wilkes Booth right before he commits the heinous act… but an ill-timed “alpha bullet” from Highfather yanks them — and the rest of their team — back into the present, and a momentarily shaken Booth proceeds as planned.
7. “The Breaking Strain” (Avengers West Coast #55, 1990)
In 1989, Marvel published “Acts of Vengeance,” a months-long, multi-title storyline that saw the big dawgs of Marvel’s super-villains join forces to eliminate those pesky heroes once and for all. “The Breaking Strain” presents the “soul-shattering conclusion” of the crossover event, with the villains’ alliance falling apart and the real mastermind exposed at last. But just as we get that startling revelation, the story shifts to another time and place: Ford’s Theatre, April 14, 1865, to be exact, where events are shown to unfold differently than they did in our own timeline. That’s because this is one of “a billion alternate timelines” that exist in “every nanosecond since the dawn of time,” and the general seated next to Lincoln is in fact a disguised Immortus, who’s taking a few moments to amuse himself by observing one of those many alternate timelines. Fittingly for a long-lived villain, Immortus has been kicking around the Marvel universe since the early 1960s; at this point, he had eeee-vil plans afoot for using the Avengers, and the Scarlet Witch in particular, to achieve his goals. But you know what they say about all work and no play.
8. “Lincoln Immemorial” (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Comic Book #11, 1992)
If a film about two California teenagers using a phone booth from the future to kidnap historical figures so they can pass a history assignment and save all of humanity sounds a little far-fetched, well, all I can say is welcome to the 1980s. The 1989 film Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure did well enough to score two sequels (1991’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and 2020’s Bill & Ted Face the Music), two television series, and a 12-issue series from Marvel that was much better than it had any right to be, thanks to Evan Dorkin on scripts and art. The penultimate issue finds our righteous dudes learning their buddy “Abe” is due for a “most un-excellent death” in the past, and so they ride their phone booth back to the day of his assassination and bring him to their present. Except — bogus! — removing him from the timeline creates a new reality where the country is a blighted police state filled with armed lunatics who never got over the Civil War (ahem). So when Death convinces them to put Lincoln back in his own time to put history back on the right track, the boys reluctantly agree. Lincoln, though? Not so much, as you can see.
9. Superman: A Nation Divided (1999)
Technically, this one doesn’t involve a time traveler, just Superman in an alternate reality where he arrives on Earth before the Civil War. Close enough. In this 1999 Elseworlds story by Roger Stern and Eduardo Barreto, a young soldier fighting for the Union by the name of Atticus Kent takes a cannonball to the breadbasket and angrily returns it in kind to the “damn rebels” who fired it. He soon becomes the Union’s secret weapon, using his great strength and invulnerability (along with other powers that develop as the story goes along) to rout Confederate forces to the point where his presence ends the war at the Battle of Gettysburg. (Don’t worry, though, Lincoln still gets to do his address.) The other major change to history that a 19th-century Superman makes is preventing the assassination of Lincoln by detecting the sound of Booth’s gun in time to stop him, as seen here (with Booth falling on his own dagger being a convenient way to keep Kent from killing him). Lincoln then goes on to serve a second term in office (and maybe even longer; there was no rule about presidential term limits at the time), and Kent, after discovering where he really came from, embarks on a new path out west as a lone “stranger” astride a silver horse. Hey waaaaait a minute…
10. “Continuity Bandit, Part 2: Abraham Lincoln Must Die!” (Plastic Man #9, 2004)
Since his earliest days, the malleable hero known as Plastic Man has been a source of mirth and merriment, and his 2004 series is no exception. But with Kyle Baker on both script and art, it’s hard to expect anything else. On one fine April day in 1865, John Wilkes Booth, disguised as Lincoln for some unexplained reason, is on his way to assassinate the president when he is abducted by New God Metron (disguised as the Time Trapper), who’s under Poison Ivy’s mind control. Metron then dumps the fake Lincoln off on Plastic man in 2004, altering history to such an alarming degree that Plastic Man and Woozy have to take Booth back to 1865 and force him to kill Lincoln to set things right. Instead, Booth is killed by a horse and Plas and then Woozy unsuccessfully attempt to murder Lincoln themselves, leading to Plastic Man’s girlfriend of the time to join them in the past, shoot Lincoln herself, return Plas and Woozy to the restored and non-slave-based economy of the present and say, “Now all that remains is for me to use the time machine to make it so that none of this ever happened.” Boy, if I had a nickel every time someone trotted out this story plot…
11. “Curious Gorgilla and the Man in the Stovepipe Hat” (Fin Fang Four Return! #1, 2009)
First appearing in an issue of Marvel’s Strange Tales during its pre-superhero “monster mash” period, Fin Fang Foom has had a decent career since then, stepping in whenever a Marvel comic needed a giant talking dragon (purple pants optional) to move the story along. In the 2009 one-shot Fin Fang Four Return!, Fin Fang Foom returns in human-sized form along with fellow Atlas-era monsters Elektro, Googam, and Gorgilla to tackle the most frightening challenge of all: living in the modern world among us sweater-wearing primates. All sense and logic may be safely left at the door or folded and placed in an overhead storage compartment as Scott Gray and Roger Langridge deliver tales that are too hilarious for prime time (though at the rate we’re going through Marvel films and TV series, I wouldn’t bet on that). Gorgilla’s entry, which sees him preventing the assassination of Abraham Lincoln after being sent back in time by Zarrko the Tomorrow Man’s time glove, is such a pitch-perfect parody of Margret and H.A. Rey’s Curious George stories that you can easily imagine a too-curious monkey having the same fun adventures through time. Voiced by Frank Welker, of course, that’s just a given.
12. “Untitled” (John Byrne’s Next Men #6, 2011)
Running for 31 issues between late 1991 and 1994, John Byrne’s Next Men followed the adventures of five young superhumans who were the the result of an unauthorized government project. Though well received by critics and fans of Byrne’s work, the upheavals in the comic industry in the 1990s meant Byrne didn’t get the chance to return to the title until 2010, when IDW published a second Next Men series. In those nine issues, Byrne expanded on the time-travel and alternate-reality plots from the initial series, picking up from the cliffhanger ending of the first series by stranding each teammate and in divergent time periods. While others get plunked in eras like Elizabethan England or Nazi Germany, the team’s handler, Antonia “Tony” Murcheson, is stranded in the American South during the American Civil War and sold into slavery. After enduring four years of brutality, she escapes and uses her knowledge of the past to prevent Lincoln’s assassination, creating a new timeline in which Lincoln lives to a ripe old age and Murcheson becomes his most trusted advisor and one of the most honored campaigner for human rights of her time. That… sounds kind of nice, actually.
13. “Mitefall!” (Batman: The Brave and the Bold, original airdate 11/11/2011)
After a few decades of Batman showing his grimmer side in various televisual entertainments, Batman: The Brave and the Bold was a genuine delight, pairing some of the best voice artists working at the time with some of DC’s lesser-known characters in team-up tales starring the Not-Quite-Dark Knight. Though the animation style and tone suggested a younger target audience, the series was jam-packed with cameos and Easter eggs for the older DC fans, and every episode started with a short pre-opening credits adventure that was unrelated to the main story. The final episode of the series begins in 1865, where Batman stops “insidious secessionist” John Wilkes Booth from shooting Lincoln. But the assassin isn’t so easily vanquished, as he doffs his cloak to become a steampunk cyborg bent on revenge for the South. Just as he delivers the final blow to Batman, though, Lincoln delivers one presidential punch to Booth’s face before demonstrating he still knows how to swing an axe (which is kept handy “in case of Confederate cyborg attack”). It’s not quite a trip to the past — more like a trip to Parallel Universe 5501 for our hero — but it’s still a sight to behold.
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