The man of two worlds. A hero to both, and a traitor to them all. How do you pull the lies from the truth in the story of Adam Strange – and once you have, what’s left? Strange Adventures #12 is written by Tom King, drawn by Mitch Gerads and Evan Shaner, and lettered by Claytown Cowles.
There is a reason why spoilers bother us as much as they do. It’s not that the moment that’s been spoiled isn’t still amazing. It’s just that when you see it in a tweet, a meme, or hear it crudely described by an inconsiderate friend, the moment is robbed of its art. We’re aware, conceptually, of what makes the moment so thrilling, but when it’s been poorly presented it lacks the impact it ought to have had.
It enrages us because we know how good it could have been. That perfect, first thrill, now forever out of reach, but so tantalizingly close to what would have been an unforgettable experience.
I mention this because despite avoiding the Twitter for a bit, the spoilers section of the slack and discord groups I’m a part of, and even avoiding all previews for this finale, I feel like Strange Adventures #12 was spoiled for me. But it’s the comic itself that did it.
It feels like a part of the problem is the insistence on the 12-issue format. Strange Adventures isn’t a 12 issue story. It’s clear that there’s been a cover-up, right from #1, and right up until #10 we get the frustration of having to read around the story that’s not being told. Once it all comes out, we get the confrontation we’ve all been waiting for…and that’s it, apparently, because #12 is more about wrapping things up than it is about dealing with the fallout of last issue’s cliffhanger.
Alanna and Mister Terrific breeze through a rescue of Aleea, and Alanna figures out what her future entails. It’s, sadly, going to be more war, now that Adam’s no longer the bargaining chip keeping Rann safe at the expense of Earth’s safety. Adam’s replaced surprisingly quickly – Alanna steps into his role as a hero of two worlds, and Terrific? He’s roped in rather abruptly via some awkward emotional blackmail into replacing Adam as Aleea’s father. One last quote blurring the lines between the heroism of comics characters and the people who create them, and a final panel tying the series’ end to its start, and we’re done, leaving me with a confusing storm of thoughts and feelings.
Comics are meant to make you feel something. On that front, I’d say, Strange Adventures is a success. As fellow CXF staffer Vishal Gullapalli often reminds me, there is something to be admired in a story that takes a big swing and misses over a comic that plays it safe. A story ought to make you feel something, and as much as this series has frustrated me, I would be lying if I said it didn’t cut right through the heart, and the finale is no different.
As always, the work of Mitch Gerads and Evan Shaner is the absolute star of this book. Alanna is the star of this book for me, and the expressive range Gerads gives her yields more layers every time you look at her. The way he plays with light is hypnotic, the environment bleeds off the page and draws you into its world. Some panels of Aleea are hard to look at, because it’s clear she’s been through a lot, and is both too exhausted and too afraid to cry about it. There’s silliness in this issue too – as I said before, retrieving her from the all powerful Pykkts is a breeze, and the easy chaos with which they’re subdued is comical.
Shaner…Shaner breaks my heart. He draws such romantic worlds – the adventure, the youth, the freedom and majesty of a sand monster turning to glass against the backdrop of a desert sky. The fluid motion of two heroes on jetpacks, planning for their future. And the hollow emptiness he fills each panel with. That’s mastery, right there – Shaner absolutely has the ability to make a panel feel truly heartwarming, but there’s something in the light, in the colors, and, yes, the context, that brings a hollowness to this past so desperate to be hopeful. A pained hollowness, howling not simply to be filled, but to just, for once, be acknowledged, and the heartbreakingly beautiful lies that prevent it from being so.
There are two absolutely gorgeous single, full pages from each artist, but these two panels stick with me particularly hard. Aleea, in the future, looking to her mother. Alanna, in the past, a mother who has no idea that Aleea is still alive yet – but who looks back to her all the same. The reddish-orange color in her eyes that we see nowhere else in the Shaner sections but matches the harsh lighting of the Pykkt ship perfectly. Mother and daughter looking to each other across time…and Adam’s lies, the ones that separated them, intruding upon this moment.
And then, of course, that one shining moment that beautifully lays out everything this series is: that all our lives amount to is the stories we tell. The belief that it’s all built on lies, and in the end it’s the dreams that break us.
To have those lines ringing in your head adds a painful depth to every Shaner sequence the series has had. To find out Alanna wrote Adam’s biography (of course she did), to see the hopeful, bright-eyed superhero at the end signing books in direct contrast to Gerads’ vision of a tired, dead-eyed hero desperate to soak up what admiration he could from a world he had consigned to death. The concept behind Strange Adventures is beautiful, and I would love nothing more than to curl up and read the whole thing again.
But I can’t, because the parts that don’t work mar the story in ways that are hard to ignore.
Let’s set aside the pacing issues, and the Tom King signature flat dialogue that feels like it’s presenting itself as parody in ways that never quite fit. Let us only look briefly at the bizarre leaps of logic we’re asked to buy into that the plot hinges on – the idea that the only way the Pykkts could have possibly defeated a planet full of superheroes is because Adam Strange was running interference. That these super dangerous Pykkts could be so easily overthrown by two heroes armed with nothing but T-spheres, a single ray gun and a mother’s rage without either of them breaking a sweat. The idea that somehow, Terrific is responsible for Aleea’s predicament by any stretch of the imagination.
Let’s talk about the Pykkts.
For a series that leans so heavily on themes of Your-White-Hero-Is-Lying to you, for as much as it wants to subvert some pretty racist tropes from age-old stories where an American hero visits exotic lands, fights savages and is adored by the natives, we get alarmingly little perspective on any culture that isn’t American. The Pykkts are the literally faceless monsters, an endless invading force. Their faces are covered, their language is never translated for the reader <even though it would be so easy for them to do so> and in the end that’s…all we get. They started out faceless, evil monsters who exist only to be fought off. They ended the same way.
It’s not just lazy storytelling. It’s lazy storytelling in a series that takes pride in its own cleverness for pointing out how lazy this exact kind of storytelling is. Strange Adventures asks its readers to recognize the lies on the same pages it asks its readers to believe its convoluted plotting, to believe its shoehorned conclusion and that there really could be no other way things could have turned out.
It wants you to question the stories you’ve been told. But question Strange Adventures itself and the whole thing falls apart.
Somewhere, out there, is the platonic ideal of what Strange Adventures could have been. And it’s maddening to me, because this book comes so close that I can’t read it without seeing that ideal. Its flaws, however, are glaring, and make it impossible to pretend that this book is close enough to what I want it to be.
This book may be one of the most beautiful stories I’ve ever read. And I’m very, very mad at how much its own spoilers have ruined it.
