When Frank Godwin sent his adventure comic strip heroine Connie Kurridge a thousand yeas into the future, this amateur engineer had a field day imagining technologies of the next millennium. During the extended story arc, the Connie strip ran a “topper” on the bottom each week called Wonder Land. The content was often hosted by the “Dr. Chrono” character from the main storyline who had invented the time travel machine. the strip served as a kind of explainer series that elaborated on technical details related to that week’s tech of the future. But one week we get a particularly prescient future gadget that resembles the best steampunk visions from Buck Rogers.

Godwin invents the iPad of 2936, a handheld screen that compiles books and magazine into a portable, handheld microfilm reader. The final panel even anticipates live streaming video.

Godwin was a reluctant comic strip success. He seemed to prefer magazine illustration, a style that he applied to several seires like Connie and then Rusty Riley after WWII. Godwin and the Connie strip in particular, have been woefully overlooked in the comics history canon. She was, along with Orphan Annie and Ella Cinders, a female adventurer who preceded the male dominated “Anventurous Decade.” Godwin’s talent in expression, landscapes alien and familiar, and composition far exceeded most of his peers on the comics page. Luckily, Classic Comics Press is planning to reprint both Connie dailies and Sundays in the coming months, and it is republishing previous reprints of Rusty Riley.