Earth's Greatest Hero

Tom Strong Volume 1: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Chris Sprouse, Alan Gordon, Art Adams, Jerry Ordway, Dave Gibbons, and Gary Frank (1999-2000): Ah, Tom Strong, Alan Moore's delightful homage to Doc Savage, Tarzan, Superman, and pretty much any other hero you might want to throw in there. This is Moore's least cynical, most big-hearted creation, a glimpse of how things might have been if DC hadn't pissed him off all those years ago and he'd instead taken up the writing chores on Superman.

Here, we get the origin of Tom Strong, raised from birth to be the world's greatest physical and mental specimen. We also get some adventures circa 2000 fighting super-Nazis and giant, intelligent slime molds and self-replicating super-machines, and flashback stories detailing Strong's back-story from the 1920's, 1940's, and 1950's. The present-day stuff is beautifully rendered by Chris Sprouse and Al Gordon, while the flashbacks contain crackerjack, period-appropriate (Tom's adventures span 100 years and about 100 genres) artwork by others. Highly recommended.


Tom Strong Volume 2: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Chris Sprouse, Alan Gordon, Alan Weiss, Paul Chadwick, Gary Gianni, Kyle Baker, Pete Poplaski, Russ Heath, and Hilary Barta (2000-2001): The highlights of this second volume of Tom Strong adventures are a two-issue visit to Terra Obscura, Earth's alien-occupied twin, and the battle in The Tower at Time's End. The former is a loving nod to decades of crossover team-ups between super-heroes of different Earths. The latter is an in-depth homage to a class Captain Marvel Family adventure of the 1940's, complete with a C.C. Beck art tribute by Pete Poplaski that's a delight. Highly recommended.


Tom Strong Volume 3: written by Alan Moore and Leah Moore; illustrated by Chris Sprouse, Karl Story, Howard Chaykin, Shawn McManus, and Steve Mitchell (2002-2003): Much of the action here is taken up by Tom Strong, his family, and assorted allies battling an invasion of giant, space-faring ants. It's fun. Recommended.


Tom Strong Volume 4: written by Alan Moore, Peter Hogan, and Geoff Johns; illustrated by Chris Sprouse, Karl Story, Jerry Ordway, Trevor Scott. Sandra Hope, Richard Friend, John Dell, and John Paul Leon (2003-2004): Tom Strong gets to see his own life through the looking glass when a mysterious invader of the Stronghold HQ tells him the story of an alternate Earth's Tom Stone, who initially seems to have been a much better version of Tom Strong. But things change. Recommended.


Tom Strong Volume 5: written by Mark Schultz, Steve Aylett, Brian K. Vaughan, and Ed Brubaker; illustrated by Pasqual Ferry, Shawn McManus, Peter Snejberg, and Duncan Fegredo (2004): The only volume without any actual writing by Alan Moore, this one ends on a great two-parter that works as an homage to Moore's own work, specifically Miracleman/Marvelman, by Ed Brubaker and Duncan Fegredo. Recommended.


Tom Strong Volume 6: written by Michael Moorcock, Joe Casey, Steve Moore, Peter Hogan, and Alan Moore; illustrated by Chris Sprouse, Karl Story, Paul Gulacy, Jimmy Pamiotti, Ben Oliver, and Jerry Ordway (2005-2006): Thanks to DC's acquistion of Wildstorm, the former Image Comics imprint that was producing Tom Strong and the other titles in Moore's America's Best Comics line (Top Ten and Promethea chief among them), Tom Strong comes to a somewhat abrupt end as Moore pulls the plug rather than work for DC any longer, even at one remove (DC acquired Wildstorm near the beginning of Moore's ABC Comics line and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen).

The legendary Michael Moorcock scripts a two-parter in which Tom and friends cross over with some Moorcock characters (and one extremely familiar looking black sword), while Moore himself writes the final issue, a crossover with the apocalyptic ending of Moore's Promethea series. Highly recommended.

Albino Gnome

The Chronicles of Conan Volume 3: The Monster of the Monoliths and Other Stories, written by Roy Thomas, Michael Moorcock and James Cawthorn, illustrated by Barry Windsor-Smith, Gil Kane and others (1971-72; collected 2006): It took awhile for Marvel's comic-book Conan the Barbarian to gain sales traction, but once it did it ran for about 30 years in both colour and black-and-white magazines. For fans, the high point of the series came early, when long-time writer Roy Thomas was teamed with up-and-coming artist Barry Windsor-Smith for the first twenty issues or so of the colour comic.

Windsor-Smith's art became increasingly refined, complex and painterly as the series went on, evidenced in part here by the decision to try printing one issue directly from his pencils (it doesn't work that well here reproduced and remastered in a high-quality format, so I shudder to think what it looked like on pulp newsprint).

Thomas was (and is) an almost self-parodically verbose writer, and it becomes quite trying here after awhile, though this was admittedly also Marvel's house writing style at the time. Which is to say, every damn panel has to have dialogue or captions in it. When your book is about a taciturn barbarian, this seems especially annoying.

Included here is the two-part cross-universal team-up between Conan and Michael Moorcock's anti-Conan sword-and-sorcery character, Elric of Melnibone. The Windsor-Smith art achieves some startling effects in this story, especially in a battle between two god-like beings, though it suffers somewhat from Windsor-Smith's misunderstanding of what Elric's headgear was supposed to look like. As is, Elric ends up wearing a hat that seems to have been borrowed from a garden gnome. How does Conan keep from laughing?

Other artistic high points occur throughout this reprint collection, including a two-parter illustrated by Gil Kane. The writing can be a really heavy, purple slog at points, but the art makes this worth picking up. Recommended.

Scary Stuff, Kids

Comics:


Haunt of Horror, written by Richard Corben and Chris Margopoulos, based on stories, poems and fragments by Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, illustrated by Richard Corben: Haunt of Horror brings together about two-dozen generally loose adaptations of an assortment of pieces by American horror-fiction Titans Poe and Lovecraft. Corben's best-remembered work is probably still Den, the sword-and-sorcery series from the 1970's that was adapted into the sword-and-sorcery segment of the Heavy Metal movie in which John Candy voiced the hero. Corben has become a supremely gifted horror and fantasy writer/artist over the intervening decades, and his work here really achieves some nicely creepy effects.

One of the decisions that makes this an interesting volume is that Corben doesn't try to adapt any of Poe's or Lovecraft's more famous, longer works. Instead, he focuses on short pieces that can be profitably adapted ("Dagon", "The Telltale Heart") and on poems and prose fragments which he adapts loosely, very liberally (Poe's "The Raven" doesn't much resemble its source, while several Lovecraft poems which were originally all about mood here become the inspiration for much more concrete scares.

Overall, I really liked this approach to adapting these two icons -- the pieces chosen were all of suitable length, and there are many suitably grisly, mysterious and cosmic vistas throughout the book. I wish Corben, who's already adapted William Hope Hodgson's minor masterpiece of a horror novel, The House on the Borderland, would turn his pen to Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" or Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym." That would be sweet and tasty. Highly recommended.


Tom Strong Volume 6, written by Alan Moore, Michael Moorcock, Joe Casey and others; illustrated by Chris Sprouse, Jerry Ordway, Paul Gulacy and others: Among other pleasures, Alan Moore's America's Best Comics (ABC) imprint at Wildstorm offered tantalizing glimpses of what Moore's comics career might have been like had he not vowed to never again work for DC Comics after a dispute over money owed (or not owed, from DC's perspective) to Moore and artist Gibbons for various knickknacks derived from, and special editions of, Watchmen. Justifiably or not, DC managed to alienate their most popular writer over a matter of what was probably a few thousand dollars, scuttling at least two series that were already in the planning stages: the Watchmen prequel Minutemen and the dystopic, apocalyptic DC Universe 'What if?' series Twilight of the Superheroes.

Tom Strong, the adventures of a long-lived 'science hero' and his family and friends, reads a lot like Moore's take on pulp hero Doc Savage, but there's also a fair amount of Superman thrown into the mix. Is this what a potential Moore Superman project might have looked like, just as Moore's Promethea looks a lot like a metafictional, apocalyptic take on DC's Wonder Woman? We'll never know.

Of all the ABC-Universe books, Strong is the one that's both the lightest in tone and the "straighest", for lack of a better term (as this has nothing to do with sexual orientation). Moore plays his usual metafictional games throughout the book's five-year run, but Tom Strong is pretty much a cynicism, parody-free zone -- in this sense, it prefigures Grant Morrison's nouveau-Silver-Age All-Star Superman.

Here, in the final Tom Strong volume (for now, anyway) Tom and his family and comrades must deal with the end of the world. But prior to that, guest writers that include long-time British fantasy great Michael Moorcock (Elric) and several guest artists put Tom through a variety of crises -- the Moorcock piece brings in characters from Moorcock's own multiverse of characters, including a sinister descendant of albino sword-and-sorcery character Elric, along with what appears to be the soul-eating sword Stormbringer from the same Elric series. The art and writing are all top-notch throughout, though one probably needs to start earlier in the series to get a full grasp of the dynamics. Highly recommended.