Worlds Unknown #2. A Gun For Dinosaur.

I don't need to take a sneak peak beneath my Christmas tree.

Why?

Because I already know what I'm getting for Christmas.

A time machine.

How do I know that? Because I've just come back in time and told myself.

Needless to say, I've now just killed my future self and stolen his time machine.

Arf, that's showed him who's boss.

But it's not all fun and games doing time travel, as we discover in issue #2 of Marvel's 1970s series Worlds Unknown.

In it, a couple of entrepreneurs are in the habit of taking clients back in time so they can bag the odd dinosaur and then take its head back to the present to impress their mates with.

Sadly, it all goes awry when, against their better judgement, they take two people with them who have lots of money but not much sense.

Inevitably, it all ends in disaster for the two clients, prompting the next prospective customer to decide not to take up his option of going.

It's a very odd story that wrong-foots you by not going in the direction you expect it to.

After all, thanks to Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder, we all expect such tales to end with the present having been irreparably altered by some wally standing on a butterfly in the distant past.

But not one butterfly gets trodden on in this tale - or is even seen. And any potential for time-line alteration is ignored as the story gives us a totally different moral. Which is that it takes a real man to tangle with dinosaurs, so don't try it unless you can handle a big gun.

While this is no doubt true, it's not a moral that's likely to make much impact on the lives of most of us.

But the tale does have the trump card that the two customers are so idiotic that you positively want them to get eaten by dinosaurs. And, as we all know, there are few things more pleasing in literature than seeing fools get their comeuppance.

And with that, merry Christmas. Don't forget to pull a cracker and don't forget to spurn the chance to tangle with a dinosaur.

Unless it's a very small dinosaur.

Like Barney.

Barney the Purple Dinosaur. How nice would his head look over my mantelpiece now I have my very own time machine?