Around 1992 or 1993, I borrowed a comic-book-format magazine from someone. It was a pretty thick publication (well over 100 pages, I'm thinking; maybe over 200?) and was printed in Spanish. I think I noticed this particular magazine had been published in Argentina, but I won't swear to that. The contents of this magazine were several "short stories" in comics format, and/or some installments of ongoing serials. (I'm not sure, because I borrowed more than one publication, and I'm not sure which stories were all clumped together in the same magazine.)
Today, I suddenly remembered one story in particular, and started wondering if it would be possible to identify it and track it down after all these years. Here's what I think I remember:
The opening sequence is set during World War II, in one of the European cities which is currently under the control of the Third Reich. I think it was a Polish city (such as Warsaw or Krakow).
We quickly meet two cute kids, prepubescent, who are a boy and a girl. They are also Jewish. They do not appear to be closely related -- definitely not siblings. I think one of them has a "mad scientist" relative (such as an uncle or great-uncle -- I'm virtually certain he was not the father or grandfather of either kid) who secretly has been building a time machine in his home.
I think some Gestapo types -- nasty characters in Nazi uniforms, anyway -- are coming to arrest this scientist. There was probably some sort of fight scene that I don't clearly remember. But the upshot is that the time machine is used by the scientist, perhaps before it was quite ready. The following individuals are catapulted back in time: The scientist, the two cute kids, and one German -- whom I think was a military pilot who somehow got caught up in the middle of things. (In fact, I think his entire plane may have somehow "gone along for the ride" and then crashed into a prehistoric jungle . . . unless I'm confusing this with some other story.)
Those four characters end up thousands, if not millions, of years in the past, apparently in a warm jungle setting. I can't remember if any exact figures were given, but there seemed to be no other human beings around in that era -- or at least not anywhere near the spot where the time travelers were stranded. (I really couldn't say what might have been happening a thousand miles away.) I can't recall any details about the prehistoric wildlife -- for instance, I don't remember if the artwork included anything resembling a dinosaur.
Something is wrong with the time machine after that emergency jump to elude the clutches of the Nazis. The scientist spends several years working to get it up and running again. The German pilot claims to not be prejudiced against Jews, and this seems to be true, since he evidently gets along well with the other three, without trying to boss them around as if he were in charge of their tiny community.
Soon we have fast-forwarded to a point where the boy and girl both look to be well into their teens, with him walking around looking like Tarzan, more or less (excellent muscular development, and we know this for a fact because he's now wearing not much more than a loincloth), and with her looking like a gorgeous actress wearing a fur bikini or something similar. It now occurs to the German pilot (after he's been getting drunk on fermented apple juice, I think) that these two kids love and trust each other, but literally don't know a thing about sex, and maybe it's time for him to give them a fatherly lecture about the birds and the bees. In his defense, I should make one thing clear: It appears that he does not use this lecture as an excuse to offer to give the beautiful girl "a hands-on demonstration of the technical details" or anything like that. The story tactfully skips over the gist of his talk with the youngsters, but the implication is that the pilot simply describes how the physical stuff is supposed to work . . . so that the youngsters can practice with each other if they want to.
The scientist comes along and -- if I remember this right -- spots the German pilot playing Peeping Tom as, concealed behind some foliage, he watches the kids going into a clinch. The scientist is very unhappy about this situation. I believe he does something along these lines: Makes a speech about immoral behavior, then drags the pilot back to his time machine, and says they two are going to test-drive it to see if it's finally back in acceptable working condition. So the time machine vanishes from this prehistoric setting, and -- as far as we know -- the scientist and the pilot never actually come back. (I can't recall if we were told exactly what became of them. Perhaps they emerged in the middle of a battlefield or something, and got blown up?)
In a big panel toward the bottom of the last page of the story, the dialogue goes something along these lines -- loosely paraphrased from my memory of how I mentally translated the Spanish phrases into English when I was reading this, way back when. The girl says, "Oh, Adam, what will we do now?" and the boy replies, "Well, Evie, I guess we'll just have to learn to fend for ourselves." I'm sure that until that moment, readers had never been told the boy's first name was Adam. We may have been told that the girl, back in the opening scene, was "Evie" or something similar. (And yes, I'm aware that this is a famous cliche in science fiction! Even 23 or 24 years ago, I had already heard of that cliche!)
In the final panel, a narrator spells it all out for us, in case anyone hadn't fully grasped the ramifications of the "surprise twist" with the "Adam and Evie" dialogue. This, we are assured, was how things "really" happened, inspiring the Garden of Eden story in Genesis, with "the Serpent in the Garden tempting them to eat from the Tree of Knowledge" being a case of a pilot who was drunk on fermented apple juice and decided to tell the kids the facts of life. Then they were fruitful, and multiplied, and replenished the Earth.
A note about the language issue: I know I read this comic book story in Spanish, but I cannot swear that I wasn't reading a translation of a story originally published in some other language! (Over in Europe, perhaps?) So if you remember something similar which was first published in German, or Italian, or any other language, please let me know!
