“Some people possess talent, others are possessed by it. When that happens, a talent becomes a curse.”
— Rod Serling
Any regular viewer of Rod Serling’s classic TV series The Twilight Zone would have learned to be careful what he wished for, particularly in the area of superpowers.
And that theme was underlined in Gold Key’s Twilight Zone comic book, published from 1962 to 1982.
In The Man Who Mastered Yoga (Twilight Zone 19, Jan. 1967), Ted Logan, an ardent student of the discipline, takes a page from Dr. Strange’s Book of Vishanti.
“I’ve studied yoga for seven years!” he tells his mentor. “I know the exercises, breathing, contemplation, and meditation! Is there no more?”
“There is one thing more,” his teacher replies. “The separation of the spirit from the body! Go into a deep trance as I have taught you, Mr. Logan!”
Logan immediately astral-projects himself to Paris, taps a sidewalk café waiter on the shoulder, and returns to the U.S., all within 20 seconds.
His mentor informs him that he is capable of entering the bodies of those who have killed their spirits through greed, gluttony, or power madness.
“I could even replace evil with good,” he muses.
Logan immediately prepares to use his newfound power in superheroic missions. Informed that free spirits are always seeking empty bodies to steal, he has a secret room constructed in his home from which he can safely fly forth on his invisible crusades.
Logan sends his spirit to the private suites of the mass-murdering dictator of Xanadu, seizing his body in mid-atrocity. Logan then orders that the concentration camps be emptied, that free elections be help,d and that the secret police be abolished.
A week of that kind of thing is enough to get the now-popular president assassinated by his minions, but it’s too late. He’s turned the political tide in the country.
“I’ve turned slaves into free men!” Logan thinks as he takes to the air. “Now I must get home to my own body!”
But it’s gone!
Logan’s mentor tells him that he can recover his own body if he can find it. In the meantime, he discovers a homeless man ruined by gluttony and parks his spirit there. Little does he realize that the body belongs to Duke, a man wanted for armed robbery.
As the police cart Logan away to prison, Serling intones, “Where Ted Logan is going, he’ll meet a lot of bodies without spirits! But he can’t use a single one of them to search for his own, lost somewhere out there in the Twilight Zone!”
Now wait a minute there, Rod! Can’t Logan just fly out of the prison walls and seek a temporary body elsewhere?
No answer from Rod, who has already moved on to narrate the introduction to Our Man on Planet Ergo.
Such superpowers played a role in several Twilight Zone episodes during its five seasons, but — as in The Man Who Mastered Yoga — they always carried a price, and often a steep one.
Time travel, either backward or forward, figures in Back There, Once Upon a Time, Of Late I Think of Cliffordvill, and No Time Like the Past. And time gets frozen at will in A Kind of a Stop Watch.
In the 1960’s The Purple Testament, a soldier gains the unsettling ability to see impending death in the faces of his comrades.
Precognition prompts greed in What You Need. A device possesses that power in A Most Unusual Camera.
A timid bank clerk acquires the ability to read minds in A Penny for Your Thoughts. Martians endow another timid fellow with super strength in Mr. Dingle, the Strong.
Another clerk gains omnipotence from a book about thought in The Mind and the Matter.
A girl who cannot speak possesses telepathic powers in Mute.
Telekinesis prompts the problems in The Prime Mover.
Old Ben can transform himself into anything or anyone he wants in The Fugitive.
A college professor turns out to be a 2000-year-old immortal in Long Live Walter Jameson.
A reporter stumbles across a small town in which the inhabitants can control time, energy, and matter in Valley of the Shadow.
Several Twilight Zone inhabitants found their wishes coming true, but never in the way they expected. A man meets a djinn in I Dream of Genie. A boy demonstrates the power to make his wishes come true in The Big Tall Wish. And so does a much more sinister mutant child, played by Billy Mumy, in the Twilight Zone’s 1961 adaptation of the 1953 Jerome Bixby story It’s a Good Life!
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