Adam Stange + Retro-futurism is good.

As we’ve all seen before (Birds of Prey, anyone?) that doesn’t usually work out. So, I passed, and apparently I was justified in doing so.

Also, Adam Strange is ridiculously fantastic.

-M

I hope I don’t need to include every single detail about a character’s publishing history. I try to talk about the best parts, and what works. If something’s lame, I tend to gloss over it. This is a series about love.

For the most part I agree, Bill, but that one is really quite a major change to the character (in fact THE major change). This isn’t the character wore a black costume for two issues. This is the plot development that prevented anyone from touching the character after the late ’80s mini for almost a decade.

And when your whole piece is about how retro-futurism-and-jet-packs is neat, I think talking about those kind of changes in the light of that was a totally missed opportunity. Not only that, I think it’s one of Alan Moore’s greatest failures in reconstructing DC characters– precisely the sort of thing he was repenting of when he created Tom Strong.

I agree it’s about love, but love is also about understanding. But, hey, you’re the guy doing this every day for a year. I’m just the guy complaining about the free ice cream

Your description of Adam Strange completely missed discussing the fact that Alan Moore tried to completely retcon all that retro-futurism in Swamp Thing, basically stating that Adam’s adventures on Rann were all contrived in order to make him a breeding stud with Alanna.

I knew about that and didn’t include it in the post. I hope I don’t need to include every single detail about a character’s publishing history. I try to talk about the best parts, and what works. If something’s lame, I tend to gloss over it. This is a series about love.

It would still be possible to tell good stories with these elements today, but most probably the best way to go for a fun, long-lived ongoing would just be to ignore it.

That two-part story is among my favorites of Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. I also loved his take on the nasty Hawkworld folks in that same story.

Your description of Adam Strange completely missed discussing the fact that Alan Moore tried to completely retcon all that retro-futurism in Swamp Thing, basically stating that Adam’s adventures on Rann were all contrived in order to make him a breeding stud with Alanna. Which I think was one of the worst examples of comics revisionism in the ’80s (and perpetrated by the author of some of the best of them no less) and I think cuts to the very point you’re trying to make: the retro-futurism central to the character is also the part that embarrasses many. And that’s not only true of Adam Strange but Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and any other of that type of character. The responses these days are to disavow it (like the Sci-Fi Flash Gordon series or Moore) or to fully embrace it, like Waid did in JLA or in 52.

Anyway, for me, there is only one Flash Gordon and that’s the one with Sam J. Jones, Melody Anderson, Topol and Max Von Sydow. It’s like Valley of the Dolls as a sci-fi movie and it’s all I ever want.

Not trying to start anything here (at least, not more than has already bee started), just curious.

I always figured that one could avoid making Ming the Merciless a racist image by simply presenting him as his own man, and getting across the point that he isn’t representative of his race, and that being Chinese isn’t what makes him evil. Making him a white guy (or green-skinned, as they did in the 1980s Defenders of the Earth cartoon) was a lousy idea from where I sit.

Seriously, I never could quite understand the appeal of the Yellow Peril trope myself. I mean, doesn’t ‘Ooh, they’re smarter than we are! They must want to take over the world!!’ make us Ocidentals look pretty stupid, as a corollary?

Anyway, regardless, thanks for the effort Bill – great entry.

“Maybe the producers didn’t want to come across as racist by not going with “Space Fu Manchu.””

Meanwhile, yet another Asian actor doesn’t get a big juicy part.

Oh, and if the Flash Gordon show was actually good, someone should tell me so I can give it a second chance.

Honestly? It felt to me as though someone took the basic, fun Flash Gordon concept — a well-meaning heroic athletic fellow from Earth suddenly displaced to the planet Mongo who ends up fighting an evil emperor and saving the universe — and ran it through a generic WB network Supernatural/Smallville/The O.C. youth-demographic blenderizer. Any time any glimmer of Alex Raymond-type fun started to show through it was squelched under a hip 21st Century reference to something — cell phone etiquette or “hooking up” or whatever. It wants to be fun but it doesn’t know how, and they didn’t spend nearly enough time actually on Mongo.

It was really, really annoying because it was ALMOST good. That’s more irritating than just plain bad. At least Dan Jurgens did the same kind of update with a genuine sense of fun.

But let’s not hijack your cool Adam Strange stuff with annoyance at the Sci-Fi channel. Adam Strange rules. I wish DC would quit shoehorning him into the main continuity stuff though. I thought Rann-Thanagar War was awful, an incoherent story with ugly art. Just a mess. Adam and the Hawks deserved better.

Topic…I got the first Adam Strange hardcover from the library. It made for a nice read, even as the formula remained the same: guy putzes around Southern Hemisphere waiting for a teleportation beam, guy goes to planet, girlfriend alerts him to new danger, guy falls back on brain to defeat menance du jour, guy gets sent back to Earth.