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Strange Adventures – I didn’t know anything about this when I got it, thinking it likely to be a strange adventure, not about a boring space knight called Adam Strange. Oh well, live and learn.
The art is great, the story a bit of a challenge to understand, but once again we get an unlikely alliance cialis rrp australia between a Thanos-like “mad god” character (here he’s called “Synnar”), who has seen his power swapped with another “paranormal” called “The Weird”, who’s not equipped to possess omnipotence (we heard this once before in the Infinity Gauntlet, when Thanos’ tortured granddaughter Nebula snatches the gauntlet and becomes all-powerful); yes, a bit of ideas-recycling going on here, but the mood of this piece is quite different from others in that is it not all about muscular posing and cosmic battles, but a bit of plotting and counter-plotting and mystery solving, with Starlin challenging the reader a bit to understand exactly what is going on; Starlin always writes complicated stories, and this one is told in the fairly complicated DC editing style. Overall, it’s fairly satisfying, and Synnar certainly looks cool.
Ironically, Adam Strange is the less interesting hero of the story – that would have to be The Comet, who is a bit of a Han Solo-like ruffian who also has a talking bulldog sidekick and a one-eyed Gamora-like mercenary girlfriend called… Eye. He has run-ins with underworld characters, while Strange has run-ins with his loving wife and brother-in-law; he even takes time to worry about his daughter’s plush toy… oh well. There’s a strange sub-plot where a wizard tries to teleport Hawkman into his chamber – when that spell is ruined by an underling, the underling is sent to personally snatch the Hawkman… but he ends up snatching Bizarro instead to make him part of the Aberrant Six, some kind of new super team (!?!?!?). And so a character from the conventional DC world gets pulled into the picture (kind of like how Superman himself got pulled into Starlin’s “Death Of The New Gods”).
The plot of the story is that The Weird, with his new powers, is absorbing all of reality Galactus-like, sucking entire stars out of reality (meaning that they don’t exist, and never have existed, when he blots them out entirely from existence). Weird, right? Or maybe just… the Weird. Or just… aberrant. The most interesting part of the story is when Comet and Strange get invited to wander around in The Weird’s psyche, and go into all of his little mental compartmentalized… compartments.
And yes, the art is really great, handled ably by the exquisite Manuel Garcia, with Starlin himself taking over for short sections (they have a similar style). The architecture of the cities and spaceships is laid out broadly, the design of spacecraft is cool, the panels interact in interesting ways, and mobs of aliens are lovingly depicted. There’s also a cool passage drawn in inky style by Rafael Albuquerque that concerns some Bizarro adventure with a kryptonite-gloved shark-creature assassin that’s living in a Matrix-like virtual reality.
Of course, Starlin (who abuses the word “decimate”) sometimes can’t resist the temptation to purple the prose:
Hardcore Station: celebrity is universal. Even this satellite boasts individuals who are famous solely for being famous. Most reach this lofty state merely by being exceedingly rich. Maya Glaxar is such a creature, having outlasted a wealthy husband four times her age. She now sits on the board of directors of a dozen of this space sector’s largest corporations. When she feels like it. Lavish parties, sex scandals and obscenely extravagant shopping sprees once placed her high on the list of the universe’s most beautiful people. But times and priorities change. Today she’s all business.
She takes a hit out on Bizarro (we never find out why) and looks very hot indeed. We never see her again. Next.
Lady Styx also makes an appearance; not sure what she’s really about, even though she blathers her life story to a companion for no apparent reason other than that we (the readers) are there to listen in. And… how does she fit in?
I’m not sure if there’s a collection of Strange Adventures 2, so this one is a bit of a one-off that was all about the formation of the Aberrant Six, that doesn’t actually allow our group of merry pranksters to embark on and complete their mission/raison d’être (talk about a drawn-out story!!!); it comes to an unsatisfying “conclusion” – rather, it’s more like it was discontinued mid-story; Strange Adventures can easily be missed. Goodbye.