By Alan Moore & various (America’s Best Comics)
ISBN 1-84023-228-5
In 1900 a boy was born to the renowned scientist Sinclair Strong and his wife. At the time they were shipwrecked on the lost island of Attabar Teru, from where they had planned to raise a child free from society according to purely scientific principles. Although Susan Strong was less than happy with her husband’s vision she acquiesced and young Tom was isolated in an atmospheric chamber where he spent the first eight years of his life growing under the weight of five gravities, and learning systematically everything the couple wished him to learn.
In 1908 a huge earthquake shattered the chamber, freeing the incredibly powerful boy, but tragically killing his parents. From then on he became a ward of the benevolently Arcadian Ozu people, learning their ways and becoming habituated to the mind-expanding longevity prolonging drug distilled from Goloka root. In 1921, he left this fabulous paradise to find the world his parents had escaped. In 1999 Tom Strong is the World’s greatest hero and has been for nearly eighty years.
Alan Moore has distilled the myriad elements of fantasy’s most popular heroes and injected them into an utterly pure comic-book world to examine the nature of this most modern myth, the super hero. All these varied elements enable him and his collaborators, primarily the superbly talented Chris Sprouse, to pay homage to their favourite fads, trends and memories whilst telling old fashioned stories in new-fangled ways.
This premiere volume introduces Tom Strong, his Ozu wife Dahlua and daughter Tesla, and the super-cool city and world they protect together. Millennium City, on the East Coast of America, is a blending of every superhero’s home town, fantastic and futuristic but still in desperate daily need of a champion. After the endearing, obligatory origin issue (this book collects the first seven issues of the monthly comic book series), the second chapter deals with the return of an old foe, the Modular Man, who menaced the world in decades past, and now threatens to overwhelm and consume the city, if not the planet.
Next is a cross-dimensional adventure as the Aztech Empire, conquerors of uncounted parallel universes, attempts to make Tom’s reality their latest acquisition. Issue #4 begins an extended epic, which tells a tale of two eras as a contemporary attack by the ‘Swastika Girls’ on Tom’s home – “The Stronghold†– leads to a flashback yarn of the hero’s lost exploits in World War II. Illustrated by Arthur Adams, this story-within-a-story is a funnybook fetishist’s dream as leather-clad Nazi superwoman Ingrid Weiss defeats Strong in the bombed out ruins of Berlin, only to return in 1999 and trap him in the distant past, when all the land mass of Earth was one huge super-continent, Pangaea.
The second part (from issue #5) again features Chris Sprouse on the main art, with another “Lost Tale of Tom Strongâ€, this one drawn by Jerry Ordway in a tribute to the classic EC fantasy tales of Wally Wood and Frank Frazetta.
Issue #6 continues the saga as Tom returns to the present for possibly the final confrontation with arch-enemy and mad-scientist extraordinaire Paul Saveen, the hidden brain behind the Swastika Girls. Dave Gibbons provides the untold tale of the first battle between these giants of science, and the main plot culminates with the revelation that Ingrid Weiss didn’t merely beat the hero in the ruins of Berlin…
The book concludes with a classic super-hero free-for-all as Tom’s wife and daughter join the fray, and Gary Frank and Cam Smith contribute a tale of 2050AD as this family saga spectacularly climaxes.
By synthesising the past Moore and Co brought back the whimsicality too seldom seen in modern comics, and by attempting the tone rather than the trappings managed to – mostly – escape the perils of parody and pastiche to create something worth reading on its own terms. Good fun for all.
© 1999, 2000 America’s Best Comics, LLC. All Rights Reserved.