Strange Adventures

Adam Strange is a man of two worlds:  Earth and Rann, and he’s just saved the latter from an invasion by the Pykkt.  He’s also just written a book about it and is going on a book tour with his wife, Alanna, to talk about the experience.  Everything’s going well until he’s accosted at one of the stops by an apparently deranged individual who claims to know about all of the awful things Strange did in order to save Rann from the Pykkts.  While this could’ve been brushed off as the ramblings of a madman, that changes when he’s found dead the next day.  With people suspecting Adam of doing the deed, and wondering how much truth there was to what the man was saying, he turns to the one person he knows that can find out the truth of the matter.  The problem with that is Batman feels he knows Adam too well to be an impartial to his situation.  Which is how Mister Terrific got the job of digging into the truth behind an intergalactic war hero’s biggest success.

“Strange Adventures” is written by Tom King and he has a lot to say with this series.  From the moral compromises made to survive during wartime, to the ugly realities of torture, to how secrets undermine the bonds of marriage, you can’t fault him for his ambition in trying to make sense of these weighty topics.  What I can fault him for is how he’s trying to hammer all of this moral ambiguity into characters in a mainstream superhero universe.  King asks you to believe that someone like Adam would act in a deliberately unheroic manner given certain circumstances, and that his superhero friends wouldn’t help him out or pick up on anything being wrong with him until it’s too late.  All this is to say is that if you really liked (or could look past) how the writer did similar things in “The Omega Men” and “The Vision,” then you’re likely to enjoy this more than I did.

Though this maxiseries is graced with good art, courtesy of Doc Shaner on the Rann flashbacks and Mitch Gerads in the present day sections, it also compares unfavorably to King’s best superhero work:  His “Mister Miracle” maxiseries.  That was another series that looked like it was going to embrace all the sad, depressing tropes that lesser writers think confer depth upon superhero storytelling.  However, it featured a twist midway through that turned my assumptions on their heads and elevated the story as a whole.  There’s a similar twist, a reveal, that King saves for close to the end of the series that has the opposite effect.  Once Adam’s big secret is revealed, you’re left wondering why he didn’t find some secret way to let the Justice League know what was going on as opposed to going through with his actions.  I can see what King was going for here, but I can’t shake the feeling that it would’ve been better served by either telling this story with regular humans or his own brand of superheroes.