Tom Strong

(Review uploaded 12/30/99)

Book 1 (Hardcover collection)

Writer: Alan Moore

Artist: Chris Sprouse, with a segment in #6 by Dave Gibbons

Wildstorm (currently published and distributed through DC)

             Another excellent example of the quality Alan Moore brings us in the America's Best Comics. (See also: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promethea, Top Ten and to a lesser degree, Tomorrow Stories, when I get around to those reviews.)

              This is largely in the vein of Doc Savage, with a shred of Zot! tossed in. Tomas Strong, born at the turn of the century and raised on a secluded island under 5 times Earth's normal gravity, fed a special, vegetarian diet and carefully instructed by his parents and a robotic servant - all around the start of the 20th century - is now nearly 100 years old and barely showing it via a graying of the temples. Physically and intellectually, he is a superman.

             The brings us the adventures of him, his wife, their daughter, their robotic servant and a surgically-augmented gorilla, who has essentially the intelligence, speech patterns and general mode of dress of an Englishmen from the early part of the 20th century. The present, while also being used to tell his current adventures, is used as a framing device for earlier adventures that are pertinent to the present. Moore has also used this to good advantage in Watchmen (and Chris Sprouse's artwork here is similar enough to Dave Gibbons' to bring the similarity to mind) and Supreme, to pick two, good examples.

             Should Moore decide to stay with this series for the long term, I hope that we'll eventually see some reason why Tom apparently hasn't deigned to share things such as the special, bitter root that affords him and his family their longevity. For now it remains unclear if we're supposed to just look at this as we do with most mainstream superhero comics and not question the sort of tech/class disparity between adventuring geniuses and the rest of the world, or if Moore has a story to explain that, too.

             Either way, this series is currently one of the reasons I'm glad I returned to reading comics.

                                                                                                          ===MJN