I’m convinced that my life would be materially improved if I had just two things: a rocket belt and a ray gun.
However, the object lesson of interstellar champion Adam Strange is that ray guns, rocket belts, and pretty red fin-headed uniforms are finally useless when the menaces arrive.
Only quick thinking prevails.
“I’ve been so frequently disappointed by many of the modern-day appearances of Adam, in which the writers downplay his intellect and just make him a Shoot-First-And-Ask-Questions-Later space cowboy — and in some instances he’s portrayed as little more than a blundering fool,” observed comics historian Gene Popa. “They did not read and grasp his original stories, sad to say.
“Of all of the DC characters who have been ‘re-constructed’ in the wake of Dark Knight, Adam has been perhaps the most sorely maligned.”
Adam Strange was lightning — or maybe a Zeta Beam — in a bottle, in terms of artist (Carmine Infantino), writer (Gardner Fox), and the feature’s jet-age moment in history. Because of the space race, scientific rationality was then being emphasized in America to a degree we have not, sadly, seen since.
“Few authors have been so good at intellectual and even anti-violent yet still thrilling adventures as Gardner Fox,” wrote Mark Staff Brandl.
In Mystery in Space 73 (Feb. 1962), Strange’s arrival on Rann coincides with an invisibility plague affecting everyone but him. The invisible alien warriors who caused it are seemingly immune to ray gun blasts.
The sharp-eyed spaceman observes that the empty-uniformed warriors never risk hand-to-hand combat, and deduces that the “warriors” are merely misdirection.
The real enemy must be elsewhere, and Strange tracks him down — a bit of multicolored energy ribbon named Ziathrion, a criminal scientist from the planet Karthal.
The invulnerable Ziathrion gloats as he shrugs off the effects of all weapons, but then Strange seizes him just as the Zeta Beam is wearing off, and both are teleported to Earth. There, far from Rann’s triple sun, Ziathrion is vulnerable, just as Strange had reasoned.
The Champion of Rann leaves Ziathrion under a tree, forever inert.
“His behavior is an example of someone doing something by seemingly doing nothing,” observed comics analyst Michael E. Grost. “This is a Tao-like situation. It appears infrequently in other works, but it is always an interesting concept. It builds up suspense: the reader can see the tale is going somewhere, but cannot figure out where.”
“The fighting with the invisible army invaders on Rann is echoed by the Earth opening of the tale, where Adam dodges bullets from guards over a diamond mine in the South African Veldt. Both planets’ fight scenes are off-trail, unusual variants on conventional combat,” Grost noted.
“Many Earth openings in Adam Strange have a meditative quality, where a lonely Adam confronts some remote, wild part of the Earth. This story is a contrast; there is a frenzied encounter with armed men. The feel is enhanced by the time constraints under which Adam is operating: he has just 10 minutes from his last appearance on Earth to meet the new zeta beam.”
As Vincent Mariani observed, “While Adam Strange’s knack for thinking through problems to come up with viable solutions has rightfully long been pointed out by Silver Age analysts, that cerebral trait was a hallmark of DC comics heroes in all genres, particularly in stories edited by Julius Schwartz.”
“So the quick-witted Adam Strange, with his emphasized thought process, was both typical and exceptional. Events of the 1950s had ushered in a somewhat tame and cautious era in comic books, and DC — a company that had always been less garish than its competitors — wisely downplayed violence in favor of intellect, with added bits of educational and scientific material sprinkled through scripts. Adam Strange’s adventures epitomized the period’s direction in storytelling.”
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