Strange Adventures

This week Amazon shipped my preordered copy of the Adam Strange Archives, Volume 3.

How it came to be that a book I ordered three months ago, and which became generally available two months ago, was just now shipped is a story I won’t tell in this blog.

When DC first published their hardcover archive editions several decades ago I wasn’t a big fan. The early ones featured stories from the Golden Age Comics. I’m old, but not old enough to be nostalgic for the forties, and in my opinion the stories don’t wear well today. But in the last few years, as DC began releasing hardcover editions of stories from the Silver Age, I began collecting them. Particularly gems I missed during the sixties like Hawkman, the Flash, the Blue Beetle, the Doom Patrol and the Kirby stories of the Challengers of the Unknown, when I was completely focused on the Superman family.

My introduction to Adam Strange came in the early seventies when I began collecting the comics I read. DC’s science fiction anthology reprint comics were some of the first non-Superman family books I began to buy regularly. At the time DC published two: From Beyond the Unknown and Strange Adventures. Both featured wonderful written and illustrated short sci-fi stories, many written by comic writers who also wrote science fiction short stories for magazines or who wrote science fiction novels, and drawn by DC’s best artists of the fifties. I would happily place most of these stories along side the best of EC comics of the same era. Their tone is more wholesome, but they are just as imaginative and skillfully crafted.

Before it was given to editor Julius Schwartz, Strange Adventures had featured the original Deadman series, illustrated by Neal Adams. From the beginning, Julie began reprinting Adam Strange, a series he edited in the fifties. And what could be more appropriate than publishing Adam Strange in Strange Adventures?

Early in the run, Julie experimented with a couple new Adam Strange stories that he assigned to Denny O’Neil. Unfortunately, by the early seventies Gardner Fox and John Broome, the authors Julie had worked with for decades, the two men he used most frequently on all his super-hero revival books, and the men most suited to writing science fiction, had left DC and were not available to write new Adam Strange stories. Denny O’Neil wrote New Wave science fiction, stories less focused on science and plot and more focused on character and dialog. Apparently neither story sold well enough for DC to revive Adam Strange as a new series and the reprints continued for several years.

The truth was that even though the old Adam Strange stories were ten to fifteen years old, they far outclassed the new stories. They were illustrated by Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson, who were both at their peak, and whose pencils and inks perfectly complement each other. Even with the limited 16 color palette of “four color” comics, the artwork was uncommonly beautiful. The skies of Rann ran the gamut of soft pastels: yellow, pink, light green and blue. The desert plains stretched as wide as the page, and in the distance the horizon was usually broken by far-off fanciful futuristic spires of some Rannian city. Infantino drew Adam flying by jet-pack through the skies like he was swimming underwater.

The stories generally followed a familiar formula. In the sixties all series fiction, not just comics, but television too, adhered to formula. Think Gillian’s Island, where the story was always about trying to get off the island; or Bewitched, which was always about Samantha trying to conform to suburbia for her husband.

Adam Strange was an archeologist from Earth, who was accidentally captured by a teleportation ray, the Zeta Beam, which took him to Rann, a planet in the Alpha Centauri star system, Earth’s nearest neighbor. The Zeta Beam intersected Earth’s path at regular intervals, as the two planets aligned themselves, always in the southern hemisphere, because Alpha Centauri is only visible in the southern skies and the Zeta Beam was like light -- it traveled in a straight line. However the teleportational effects of the Zeta Beam wore off after a few days, and Adam faded back to the Earth location he had been taken from. Each time Adam arrived on Rann, the planet was faced with some terrible adversary or natural disaster. Armed with technology from Rann, and powered purely by his intelligence, wits, and logic, Adam routinely saved his adopted planet, while forging a romantic relationship with the daughter of the scientist wore invented the Zeta Beam and brought him to Rann in the first place.

Adam was perhaps one of the earliest post modern hero, in that he was acutely aware of the formulaic nature of this adventures on Rann, and because of his desire to stay on Rann with Alanna, tried to defeat it’s limitations. Julie and Gardner Fox sometimes tinkered the formula as well, having the Rann’s menace come to Earth, or starting the story with Adam’s departure from Rann.

Modern series fiction avoids formula like the plague, but however maligned it may be today, I never tire of its application. In my opinion a formula frees the author from worrying about being original in unimportant ways and allows him/her to concentrate their originality on the other areas of the plot. Think Bill Murray in “Ground Hogs Day”. Bill’s character knew certain things would happen every time the day was repeated, and that certainty freed him to experiment with his behavior in ways he could never have imagined. Authors of series fiction today spend too much energy on imagining how a character can change and not enough on telling a story.

Of course you might ask, why did I bother to buy three pricey volumes of the Adam Strange Archives when I already own the seventies reprints? I suppose that I love the series so much I simply wanted to own it in hardcover and have the excuse to read the stories again.

As much as I am glad that DC is using Adam Strange in new stories today, such as the Rann/Thannagar war series, I wish that they would recognize the qualities that made Adam Strange great -- the nobel qualities of Adam and the Rannians, and the tight science fiction plots of his early adventures.