Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales Book 2

 

By Alan Moore, Steve Moore & Various (America’s Best Comics)
ISBN: 1-4012-0615-8

There’s a delicious zeitgeist permeating comics these days. There was a time in the comic industry when carnivorous copyright attorneys roamed the veldt, able, ready and so much more than simply willing to issue writs at the slightest pretence on behalf of one company against another, or even against small kids in the playroom who’d used half gnawed crayons to make Daddy a picture of Spider-Man. It seemed as if simply being drawn the same height as a company trademarked property was enough for the vultures to swing into a holding pattern.

Those days, it appears, are gone forever. Every company has now bought into a process where a thinly disguised ‘homage’ enables creators to access a greater, shared fantasy meta-culture, whether for unsanctionable guest shots, as cool foils such as “Doc Brass” or “the Four” in Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary, or simply for its own sake as in Alan Moore’s ABC works like Tom Strong.

The second volume of Terrific Tales collects issues #7 – 12 of the comic series and features, as usual, short tales of Young Tom Strong’s early life by Steve ‘no relation’ Moore and Alan Weiss, pulp scienti-fiction romps with the outrageously upholstered Jonni Future (by Steve ‘still no relation’ Moore and Art Adams) and what can only be described as gloriously experimental outings from Alan Moore himself and a variety of top names.

Shawn McManus draws the memorable storybook fable ‘Blanket Shanty’, Jason Pearson illustrates ‘The Tom Strong Cartoon Hour’ whilst Michael Kaluta provides pictures for the prose ‘Millennium Memories’. The highlight for me is ‘Coloring Our Perceptions’ a wordless, primitivist strip spectacularly painted by Avant Garde cartoonist Peter Kuper, although it is a delicious delight to see Bruce Timm’s pastiching of comic book jungle girls trapped in a game preserve (‘Jungle is Massive’). Rounding out the pictorial radicalness is Peter Bagge’s particular brand of post-modern, urbane angst in the domestic chiller, ‘The Strongs’.

This is an interesting book for interesting times but I still can’t help but wonder what you feed Lawyers to keep ’em docile.

© 2005 America’s Best Comics, LLC. All Rights Reserved.