Strange Adventures

Tom King & Mitch Gerads Strange Adventures (2021)
Adam Strange is a regular guy who finds himself randomly and instantaneously beamed to the distant planet of Rann, there to fly around wearing a jetpack solving science-fiction crimes with just his wits and his trusty laser pistol. He was an old school character from before pow! the comic book grew up, one I first encountered in Alan Moore's version of Swamp Thing wherein it was revealed that the sexy naked ladies of Rann were literally queuing up for a go on Strange's mighty Earth penis. Whether or not pow! the comic book had grown up by this point is probably debatable, but issues were sold only to older boys and girls who had - you know - done it.

I'm now at the stage where I'd probably pick up The Adventures of Jeff Lynne and ELO were it produced by Tom King and Mitch Gerads, so I found Strange Adventures irresistible. I know some Toms have been better than others. Rorschach wasn't quite what I'd hoped it would be and Batman could have been better, but this one is up there with his best.

I remain mostly unconvinced that the comic book ever truly needed to pow! grow up, mainly because it usually translates into Red Tornado taking crack and then having a wank behind some bins; but Strange Adventures shows us how it's supposed to work. The art is gorgeous, suggesting bande dessinées rather than the usual manga-influenced tripe, and the telling is nothing if not cinematic, invariably leaving it up to the reader to work out what the hell is happening.

What the hell is happening is that this version of Adam Strange is involved in a war. It wouldn't be anything new but for King writing with all the nuance necessary to describe actual conflict, doubtless drawing from his own experience in Iraq. The revelation of Strange having engaged in less than chivalrous acts during the heat of battle comes as no great surprise, but the supplementary revelation of the deed being very much what it looks like rather than a dream or fake news is genuinely shocking. Ordinarily we'd ask how he's going to get out of this one, and he doesn't; yet this isn't one of those jobs where we know that pow! the comic book has grown up because we can quite clearly see Superman killing a homeless person for chuckles. Rather, the startling message is that terrible things happen during war, and usually so terrible that no amount of squinting can ever draw forth some tidily moral lesson about good and evil, getting one's hands dirty, omelettes requiring broken eggs or whatever other bullshit we keep telling ourselves. So King's Adam Strange isn't a hero, or if he is, he's a hero who goes to war and fails to come out of it smelling of roses - the whole point being that no-one does.

Strange Adventures resembles a comic book but reads like a novel, and a fairly substantial novel too.