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quote:Originally posted by Captain Zoom:
ERD, have you managed to keep interested in Tom Strong? I bought it for a while and just couldn't get into it. I've got the trade at my store and keep thinking I should read it, but I've never got around to it. Did it get better after the first 3 issues?
I don't know where to begin here, so forgive me if this makes little or no sense to anyone else. I'm in that 'defending something you love' position that's always difficult to express objective opinion from.
I think the thing that makes Tom Strong such a wonderful comic, for me, is the sense of innocence that Moore imbues it with. It treads so close to being cheesy and moralistic, but never takes that final, fateful step. You know that Moore's just playing around, reinventing Superman without all the nasty fascist leanings that good ol' Kent has and rewriting old strips with a new cast of characters, but there's never a hint of a 'knowing wink' or other trappings of postmodernism. The ‘knowing wink’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it tends to get drastically overused - one of my main bug bears about Morrison <gets ready to duck rotten veg> is that he seems absolutely incapable of staying sincere within a single issue of a comic, let alone a series.
And yet, Moore still manages to make each issue an examination of the comic book medium, without this subtext ever diluting the main story. I’ll agree that issues 1 and 3 weren’t his best work ever, but #2 was fantastic. Here we have the superhero being faced by an (apparently) frequently returning enemy, the Modular Man. This enemy keeps coming back; no matter how many times our hero faces him in battle and beats him, he’ll always be able to return to cause trouble again. It's a recurring (no pun intended) theme in seperhero stories, but, just at the point that any other superhero would kick the shit out of his nemesis without a second thought, Tom reasons with his.
“Sure [you’ll return]. And then I’ll destroy you in Japan, and a year later you’ll regrow somewhere in Russia. Doesn’t sound much of an artificial life to me. Brief periods of consciousness, maybe a week in 2009AD, perhaps three days in 2025… Never being allowed to grow bigger than a neighborhood before the bombers are sent in… Is that really the kind of future you want?”
“No. So, tell me… What do you suggest?”
And Tom gives him Venus! Like, the entire planet! Then it’s all capped by a beautiful ending, where Tom tells his wife that on his recent visit to Venus, he found the planet…
“…silent. Oh, there were breathtaking vistas and beautiful sunsets, but it all went unobserved. It’s only life that gives meaning to the stars and worlds, my sweet. Life… or something very much like it.”
And that’s when you hear the orchestra reach its crescendo. Our hero’s won the day without once lifting a fist in anger.
Now I type all that, I realize you know it all already. Hmm.
You’ve missed the Paul Saveen four-parter that ran from #4 to #7, and included Tom’s Nazi clone son. You’ve missed four or five issues that have been made up of smaller, unconnected tales, most of which have shown Moore not giving a rat’s arse for universe consistency or any of the other, decidedly anal gubbins that a series can so easily become mired in. You’ve missed Tom helping to save the world of one of his (many) alternate universe selves, in the process meeting characters who are obviously intended as homage to golden-era greats. Not being a comic book nut, I can’t recognize them all, but that’s not a problem in this comic. With Planetary, I’m sure that a great amount of the appeal comes from figuring out all the cameo appearances in each issue (hell, the funeral issue was good for very little else; we even had a fucking thread devoted to spotting them all, ferchrisakes). In Tom Strong, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know that the character at the back left of panel two on page 24 of issue 12 is supposed to look a bit like Captain America. The story has meaning without it; it doesn’t need to rely on such clever-clever tricks.
None of this makes any sense, does it? The only other way I can try and explain it is like this:
That argument we all had in this forum a few weeks ago, just before Cameron left. I said that superhero comics should be written for kids, but in such a way that adults can get huge enjoyment from reading them too. That’s achieved by refusing to talk down to your primary audience, to treat them with the respect they deserve and as having greater intelligence than they’re usually given credit for. Alan Moore does that in every single issue of Tom Strong.
Zoom, can I just suggest that you check the new Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales, or maybe track down copies of Tom Strong #11 and #12? Each issue is so distinct from the last that it's difficult to know what to recommend, but those are some of the best yet.
[ 13-01-2002: Message edited by: E. Ranty Dupre ] |
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