Review: Strange Adventures hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

Tom King’s Strange Adventures is a strange Adam Strange story, and while I promise that’s the last time I’ll use that alliterative construction, it’s no less true.

I wonder at what point with these DC Black Label books we’ll end up with a Hawkworld situation, where what wasn’t intended to be or shouldn’t be continuity becomes such, possibly by accident. We saw, for instance, Scott Free’s son from King’s Mister Miracle show up in Tom Taylor’s DCeased: Dead Planet, though that’s explained away as one DC “Elseworld” reflecting another.

No one’s going to mistake Sean Murphy’s clear alt-world White Knight series for continuity, nor the many Black Label origins of Harley Quinn (Harleen, Criminal Sanity). But I think there is that danger with Strange Adventures, a wonderful and yet truly emotionally awful Adam Strange story that just gets more awful the longer it goes on. The DC Universe here is functionally the same as “our own” DC Universe, the characters functionally the same, and so I think it might be too easy for the careless writer of some next Hawkman or Green Lantern or even Justice Society story to make reference to Strange Adventures, thereby solidifying the terrible actions here as canon. That, I think, would take a long time for these characters to recover from.

Has DC ever stated that even if a DC Black Label book appears to take place in current continuity, the events are still separate? Not that I recall. Assuredly that wasn’t true for the former “Mature Readers” books, which included the later canonized Killing Joke, where also what was not intended to be continuity became so. Perhaps the time is now for that statement to be made. Adam Strange might thank you for it.

[Review contains spoilers]

Though Strange Adventures and King’s recent Rorschach share between them King’s current journey into the history of comics, Rorschach was more about the politics of the here and now, while Strange Adventures hearkens back to the themes of King’s Sheriff of Babylon and Omega Men — the corrupting power of war and what war makes people do. There are ideas not fully realized in both Heroes in Crisis and Strange Adventures that perhaps become clear in combination — that one can be so traumatized as to see no way out, or as to see the worst of options as viable. Assuredly Strange Adventures is Adam Strange’s Wally West-in-Heroes in Crisis moment, and again hopefully no one takes Strange Adventures as having “happened” — you’ll know it by whether Adam Strange is ever referred to as dead!

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

Overall I enjoyed Strange Adventures, which includes a cogent mystery and a Heart of Darkness-like draw toward its worst secrets. I thought King succeeded most handily in the middle, before the really bad stuff, when he posited Adam and Alanna Strange as the kind of “stand by your man,” “us against the world” political power couple in fiction that you love to hate and hate to love, House of Cards' Frank and Claire Underwood or American Crime Story’s imagining of Bill and Hillary Clinton, drawn with glassy defiance by Mitch Gerads. It is not a trope I recall seeing laid over the DC Universe before, letting alone this kind of “rules of alien planets,” “the Justice League doesn’t understand us” wrangling set out against late night talk shows. It’s ultimately, again, very bad for Adam Strange, but it’s very cool the depth King finds among the four-color funnybooks.

There is precedent for a dark take on Adam Strange, most specifically Richard Bruning and Andy Kubert’s Adam Strange: The Man of Two Worlds (from a period where “dark” was very much DC’s thing). But since that time, Strange has mostly been an amicable sort, most recently paling around with Superman in the Brian Michael Bendis titles or, before that, his good-natured origins in the Jeff Lemire Justice League United series. Lemire, too, offered an Alanna Strange as capable and swashbuckling as her husband, even supplanting his role in the team. That, amidst the cartoonish “pew, pew” sound effects, they should each luxuriate in genocide seems more than we can bear, especially even as Doc Shaner’s “classic” thread in the book gets ever darker. It’s fine for an Elseworld, but I don’t think we could wave this away as villainous mind control in the DCU’s “real life.”

I was delighted by King’s choice to juxtapose Adam Strange with Mr. Terrific Michael Holt — one straight out of comics' Silver Age and the other not really so new any more, with Terrific having been around 25 years now, but still a relative infant in the DCU. Happily King is not ignorant of what he plays with here, what superheroes looked like in the 1950s and 1960s and how far we’ve come — or not, as Terrific notes early on that “people don’t like it when people like me question people like [Adam].”

Given that acknowledgment, I think King intends us to see privilege in Alanna’s criticism that Terrific is “so perfect, your wife and child die and you just go on.” She makes much throughout the story of not being understood, of Rannians being fundamentally different than the people of Earth, but in the end Alanna is as blind to her husband’s sins as she is to the compromises Terrific has had to make to be accepted — being above reproach, settling for the label of “world’s third smartest man,” and not letting too much angst show through over his wife and child’s deaths. King’s Terrific exudes stoicism, but I think we’re meant to see his pain between the lines. (And I insist, Barry Allen and Wally West are one thing, but the greatest sin of the New 52, still unanswered, is Terrific losing Pieter “Dr. Mid-Nite” Cross, one of the better male friendships of the post-Crisis [and so on] era.)

4.0

Rating

In Strange Adventures, as in Heroes in Crisis and Mister Miracle and his Batman run, Tom King takes the superheroic swashbuckling stories of Adam Strange and peers behind the curtain, revealing that the “grand space opera” must inevitably hide atrocities. This has been the heritage of many of DC’s most lasting mature books, finding the truth that was always there but never acknowledged. Hopefully these things can stand separate, the human tragedy that one possible Adam and Alanna Strange can show us versus the characters we knew and loved. I want more like this from King, but I fear it gets too complicated if he’s made to be writing history and not fables.

[Includes original and variant covers]