posted 02-17-2002 02:28 AM               

Don’t let the talking monkey fool you.

Ditto the robot butler.

Tom Strong is a smart book.

Written by hirsute prodigy Alan Moore, this is a book about growing up. More to the point, it’s a book about how Western pop culture grew up. Tracking the 20th Century as witnessed by Strong and his family (wife Dhalua, daughter Tesla, robot butler Pneumann and simian aide-de-camp King Solomon), the first collection chronicles their pulp-inspired adventures protecting the world from enemies like the Modular Man and invading forces from the Aztech Empire at the dawn of the 21st.

But don’t be fooled. There’s a heck of a lot more going on here.

Tom Strong is self-aware right off the bat: The first chapter tells the story of Timmy Turbo, a preteen who buys the first issue of a comic called – you guessed it – Tom Strong. As it turns out, Strong’s adventures are chronicled in a series of comic books, which Moore uses as a storytelling device to clue the reader in on the family’s adventures earlier in the century.

Many of the stories involve Tom Strong battling some enemy from his past, the introductions of which are chronicled in the “Untold Tales” of Tom Strong – comics-within-a-comic written and drawn in the styles of comics from decades past. The format gives the book a chance to showcase different artists, though all, I think, have well-established résumés; Dave Gibbons, Moore’s partner in crime in the well-known Watchmen, makes an appearance.

But, as I said, it’s not all about the pulp. There’s a more profound message in Tom Strong one about how we imagine our heroes, and how that could have gone wrong, and where it didn’t.

Strong is a Western pop hero in the classic sense of the word: tall, rippling biceps, Caucasian, nigh-invulnerable. But other aspects of his story aren’t so typical. His wife, Dhalua, is black, and the two have a biracial daughter. His arch-enemy is Ingrid Weiss, a genetically engineered Nazi superwoman, who represents all of the evil things that Strong could have been created to be.

In this way, Strong is the antidote to critics who might charge that Western popular culture is white-centric and paternalistic. Strong may be the titular superhero as well as husband and father, but he is in no way patriarchal. On at least one occasion, it is Dhalua and Tesla who come to Tom’s rescue at the hands of something far more sinister than he ever could have become. Both women are strong characters, operating as part of a family unit, but at the same time fiercely independent.

I can’t say much more without giving away the ending. But in the end, all of the Strongs must do battle with the worst that humankind has to offer, and the evil that Tom could have become had he – and the people who canonized him a hero – made a few different choices.

posted 07-19-2002 03:22 AM               

That said, there are some very nifty concepts in this book. The suggestion that phlogisten -- or 'liquid heat' -- once existed in the world but no longer does suggests some interesting things about the nature of physical laws, and I'd love to see that further explored.