Comics that shaped the child's imagination...

I was an avid comics reader as a child. One source of both entertainment and education was the "Classics Illustrated" series. I have the dog-eared copies of titles like A Tale of Two Cities and Robinson Crusoe somewhere in the house... just that I don't know where! This Wikipedia write-up below brought back so many fond memories...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classics_Illustrated

I especially treasured one comic title -- The Illustrated History of Flight -- from a companion series, "The World Around Us". I must have read and re-read that title. I hope I still have it among that "lost" collection of mine. Here's one link:

http://www.tias.com/7758/PictPage/1922234465.html

I vaguely recall how that comic title, serious mostly, had a tongue-in-cheek section about how aerial dogfights started. With the First World War, was also the technology that enabled biplanes and at least one triplane type to perform military missions.

At first, the planes were unarmed and opposing pilots on recce missions waved to each other. Then, one bright spark had a brilliant idea: he fitted a machine gun in front of him, just behind the propeller. He then flew off, eager to make the world's first aerial combat "kill". The next few frames in the comic showed him firing his weapon furiously at an enemy plane. We are not told if he scored a hit, but we are next shown what happened to his plane -- the propeller had been shot to bits!

Of course, in reality, the scientists of the day learnt to synchronise the rpms of the propeller blade with the rate of fire of the machine gun such that the bullets could pass through. For better or for worse, the era of the aerial dogfight was thus born.

That brings me back to my 9 Sept posting on precise words. I had said then that when Justice VK Rajah -- in a case in which a man and a woman were fighting for custody of a dog -- remarked that "This is literally and figuratively a dogfight...", to call it a literal dogfight could only mean just that, a fight between two canines.

But "mloh", who had read that posting, suggested in his comment that Justice Rajah might have been thinking of aerial dogfights in that "literal" reference of his. Hmmm, plausible. Thanks, mloh, for that pespective.