Comic Books

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/19838351

Tom Strong, collected again in DC’s new "Compendium" format, is a clever thing. The 36-issue tome is more proof of the conceptual brilliance of Alan Moore, as if we needed it. Also: the artistic merits of penciler Chris Sprouse, as if we needed more. From the first issue to the last—by which I mean issues #1-22, and then issue #36, ignoring a stretch of fill-ins that are mostly treading water, which I’ll address separately—the whole thing is a marvel of carefully-considered structure. From the fictional setting to the timeline of events to how various elements reoccur, you can see thing whole thing has been thoroughly planned.

Launched in 1999 as part of Moore’s ABC (America’s Best Comics) line, Tom Strong appears, at first glance, to be the most traditional book on the slate. Top Ten gleefully blended superheroes with police procedural; Promethea quickly chased large metaphysical ideas into the heavens; and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen showed us how big Alan Moore’s library is. On the surface, Tom Strong is a rather straightforward exercise in modernized pulp. Our titular protagonist is a long-lived adventurer in the manner of Doc Savage: the peak of human physical and mental abilities. Aided by his family and supporting cast, he trots the globe (and beyond) bringing justice wherever he goes. The "long-lived" part—courtesy of extracts from a special root that allows the protagonists to live throughout the whole of the 20th century—especially helps to emphasize the pulp lineage, all the way back to Tarzan. But the series quickly proves more than it appears to be, with a sinister underbelly beneath the golden sheen of utopian retro-future.

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There is only one problem. I don’t care about any of it.

I don’t regret reading the Tom Strong Compendium, because even lesser Moore is better than most other people’s best, but the whole thing feels like a big shrug. A well-executed shrug, made by Olympic champions in shrugging, but a shrug nonetheless. After 36 issues, I care for Tom Strong and his family not one iota more than I did in the first issue - which is to say, I care about them as vehicles for stories, but not in any way besides. It’s all so distant and artificial, communicated through genre exercises and knowing winks. Tom Strong, like much of the ABC line, feels like a predominantly intellectual exercise. Like the worst of Grant Morrison, its head is firmly screwed into its own metafictional arse.

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The best of Alan Moore’s work is in comics, but it’s not about comics. There’s certainly an element of comics critique throughout his catalog, because he has grown and worked within the industry, and his writing reflects that fact, but From Hell isn’t a comic about comics, nor is Swamp Thing, nor is The Ballad of Halo Jones, nor is Providence - not solely. Tom Strong is the kind of work that surrenders often to cheap and immediate references: a comic about comics and its broader lineage in pulp writing. It can only see itself.