Web hosting Custom Email SiteBuilder

The Roots of Adam Strange

DC Comics, under the influence of editors like Julius Schwartz, experimented with a number of science fiction concepts. Through disconnected one-shot tales, DC postulated a cosmos teeming with bizarre, unlikely alien forms nonetheless similar enough to the human shape that members of one species could operate the weapons and spacecraft of the other. During the fifties and sixties, this publisher generated a body of science fiction stories that it would reprint through the seventies and which merit, someday, anthologization for posterity.

However, for some time DC lacked what newspaper comics - and their spawn, comic books - had enjoyed: An ongoing space hero, a recurring and familiar face to act out adventures with the unknown cosmos. Captain Comet and the Space Ranger had, to some extent, attempted to play this role, with little enduring success. Therefore, the Schwartz faction pushed for the creation of an archetypical space opera hero that took form in the person of Adam Strange.

Though ultimately not enough of a success to sustain an ongoing title of his own (note the absence of an Adam Strange monthly title from the comics shelves), Adam Strange nonetheless, within the appropriate context, enjoyed a conceptual validity. This validity came from substantial borrowings from earlier science fiction heroes, in a fusion that combined aspects of one classic comic strip hero with particulars of a science fiction pulp hero to forge a solid, mutually-reinforcing whole.

As the neo-Classicists understood, borrowing could well serve provided talent understood what to borrow and how to borrow it. As it required aesthetic intuition to understand how to graft the Orestes theme on a tale of Scandanavian royal intrigue (as Shakespeare did in Hamlet), so, in a lesser sense, it required a feel for the comics and pulps of the early twentieth century to combine the right mixture of elements from established antecedents to produce a viable space hero.

Roots of Style

Superficially, Adam Strange owes to the tradition of the comic strip space hero, most particularly Buck Rogers. People involved with creating the character recall as much in the instructions to design him. The task of creating the visual concept fell to Murphy Anderson, who had worked previously on Buck Rogers comic strips, and his original treatment had more in common with the earlier space hero than the version that finally found its way into Mystery in Space.

We can note, from the sample above, a resemblance in headdress, modified slightly for the art standards of twenty-plus years later. And, as Anderson recalls it, Adam Strange also originally sported something akin to Buck Rogers' flight belt, though Carmine Infantino and/or Gil Kane modified this, in time for the first story, to an improbable jet pack (said device apparently designed so that it would do an excellent job of charring the wearer's posterior in the process of flying).

Yet, in important particulars, Adam Strange differed from Buck Rogers. He lacked the Rip van Winkle element of having gone into suspended animation in the present and come awake into a new world where he fought against the invading Mongols. Strange played out his adventures in the present day, and retained a connection to contemporary earth that would suggest another world-hopping hero.

Roots of Concept

Having taken visual cues and certain baseline concepts from a comic strip hero from the twenties, Adam Strange furthermore fortified himself with elements of a world-traveling pulp hero created by Edgar Rice Burroughs. John Carter of Mars did a number of things central to the Adam Strange concept long before the later hero ever donned red tights and a finned headdress.

Visually, the two characters seem rather dissimilar. Strange operated in a sanitized late-fifties interpretation of twenties space-opera, while Carter, barely clad but for a weapon harness, contended with muscle-powered weapons, against bellicose multi-limbed beasts from the waning indigenous Martian biosphere. The Buck Rogers elements, including a penchant for traveling via spaceship, somewhat muddy the traits held in common. Yet important particulars do connect the two heroes.

Consider the following linkages between the heroes. Adam Strange originally found himself miraculously transported between his homeworld earth and the distant planet Rann. He accomplished this small miracle via the device of the zeta-beam, whose rays would take him to another world for a limited time and, when they wore off, return him inevitably to the earth. This plot device both obviated the necessity of inventing an interstellar space program capable of taking Strange to another world (but which would, in the process, create a body of other space-travelers likely to undermine Strange's uniqueness) and allowed the isolation of earth from Rann (by limiting the contact between worlds specifically to Strange). One might note, furthermore, that the character worked best in isolation, and tended to develop problems when dragged into the shared-universe model in which armies of superheroes would undermine both the tone of the character and create problems with the notion of a unique figure able to connect between the two planets.

Already this establishes a pattern akin to John Carter's relationship to Mars, to which he traveled by seeking refuge from attacking Native Americans in an ancient cave, where Carter passed out, only to awaken on Mars. We have the angle of miraculous transportation between worlds; and we have the angle of the single hero offering the sole point of contact between alien settings.

Though downplayed considerably in Adam Strange, both heroes also play out a minor messianic aspect. In Carter's case, as with fellow Burroughs creation Tarzan, a degree of cultural imperialism underlay the premise that a single man from one culture could bring with him a baggage of character that made him a natural leader in the context of the culture to which one exposed him. Put bluntly, one of us would, owing to inherent superiority, become a natural leader in the context of them. Thus, John Carter rapidly rose to the role of warlord on the dying desert-scapes of Mars; and, obviously enough, Adam Strange repeatedly played the role of Hero of (and, therefore, savior of) Rann.

To this we can add the further similarity of the hero repeatedly separated from his distant love-interest. Though it would require some time and a change in editorial models before Adam Strange (or almost any conventional comics hero) could marry, he did dally with Alanna of Rann for some time. Fortunately, the interstellar void, in comics, teemed with worlds populated with many races that produced a number of Midwestern beauty queens suitable for courting by red-blooded American space heroes, and Strange never had to deal with the anatomical interface necessary for siring children on the female of an egg-laying species (such as the red Martians, including Carter's love interest, Dejah Thoris). In each case, though, the hero found himself separated from his belle by the void between worlds at the expiration of the peculiar force which translated him to another world in the first place.

Working the Syncretic Hero

In some ways, Adam strange has outdone a number of his contemporaries that shared a slight conceptual link through the veneer of the space-opera and retro-science-fiction concept. After all, those who seek to name recurring spaceman-hero types from DC's Silver Age (and immediately previous) will generally bring up Strange's name before others roughly contemporaneous - never mind that Captain Comet and occasional others might eventually make the cut. None of the others, despite occasional attempts to integrate them somewhere into a shared universe, quite captured the imagination as well. And, we might note, DC did make the attempt more than once to connect Adam Strange, somehow, to the mainstream product line represented by features like Justice League of America.

Strange probably succeeded because the peculiar combination of (admittedly borrowed) elements that form the backbone of his concept provide a very human set of themes to thrust against strange backdrops of alien worlds. Begin with the notion of a man pulled to a drastically distant place to approach the notion of alienation frequently represented as one of the somber themes of more serious literature. This separation occurs at both faces of Strange's life; on earth, Rann and his belle Alanna pull at him, just as the limiting character of the zeta-ray pulls him back towards earth (or, at least, did during a significant portion of his history). A good storyteller could make much of such material, combined with the notion that a man pulled in contrary directions has essentially to choose between stretching and splitting.

Even the long-term storytelling miscues - including the unfortunate sequence where DC sought to darken his tone and make him a tragic figure by disposing of his family through the ever-cheapening vehicle of a comic-book death - ultimately originated through explorations of the possibilities suggested by a character pulled by dual separations from two homes, two cultures, and two worlds.

One might argue, without reaching too far to make a point, that Adam Strange ultimately outgrew his source material on a number of levels. The simple adventure stories of Burroughs' Mars books provided little room for character growth, since such works sought instead to provide riveting adventure stories in an era before pulp writers (and their artistic offspring) came to take themselves too seriously. Nor, using the first twenty years or so of Buck Rogers tales, did that character much explore the inner man, even as writers and artists sought to use that archetypical hero as a means to deliver scenery and situations geared to inspire the imagination. Strange, as their heir, had more to build upon - a later, sometimes more introspective, model of the hero - which allowed him to use the tools that made the earlier source concepts work in a way more meaningful to Eisenhower- and Kennedy-era audiences.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 253. Completed 25-MAY-2001.