What kind of hypothetical telescope could see the surfaces of planets in other galaxies?

I was recently looking at a comic reprinting of Retro Sci Fi Tales # 9, and the synopsis on the site spoke about a story of the "Exposition Universelle", where at a fictitious worlds fair in Paris in 1878, they unveil a "grand inter-galactic telescope so powerful that it can view the surfaces of planets in distant galaxies". This highly intrigued me as our strongest telescopes, can at best, see blurry images of exostars in only our home galaxy. Now last Sunday, I watched Nova with Neil Degrasse Tyson, and Tyson said that using the sun as a gravitational lens; we could potentially see the surfaces of exoplanets in our home galaxy. This is amazing but lets take this one step further. Imagine you are an astronomer in say the Star Trek universe Milky Way or the Star Wars galaxy and want to see the surfaces of planets in distant galaxies as intergalactic travel (as opposed to interstellar travel) is still sketchy at best. What kind of hypothetical method of imaging could possibly be powerful enough to achieve this? You would have to see past the intergalactic void which would be quite a long distance even for Star Wars hyperdrives. Clarketech science is welcome.