April 1969: The Return of Adam Strange

I had just turned 5 when Adam Strange’s ongoing Mystery in Space series appeared on the newsstands in June 1959.

While I was old enough to love the title’s flashing colors, I was not really old enough to fathom its stories, which were fairly cerebral for a comic book.

The first time I risked a dime on Adam Strange was issue 68, cover-dated June 1961. I couldn’t resist that cover, which showed a horned alien tiger springing at a damsel in distress even as the colorful rocket-belted hero faded away back to Earth.

Happy days, then, when DC decided to reprint the interstellar archaeologist’s earliest adventures in 1969. At 15, I could fully appreciate what I’d missed.

And now, instead of Mystery in Space, the feature appeared in DC’s venerable title Strange Adventures — Adam Strange Adventures. It seemed meant to be.

And most of the reprints included the visual treat of new covers by Carmine Infantino, Neal Adams, Joe Kubert, Murphy Anderson or Nick Cardy. 

Comic book art styles had evolved in the few years since Adam Strange had been first published, becoming less benign and more alarming, for one thing. But Strange Adventures 242 sported the original Infantino/Anderson cover art from Mystery in Space 82 (March 1963). That striking split image — showing Adam Strange torn between stopping a gigantic magnifying glass menace burning Rann and a hydrogen bomb explosion on Earth — could not be improved upon. 

Having an American city casually vaporized by a mushroom cloud in the background was scary enough, even for the late 1960s.

DC published an odd house ad to promote the reprint series, inviting the reader to “Journey to the world of the future!” But the Adam Strange stories weren’t set in the future. They were contemporaneous with the era in which they were published, the late-1950s to the early 1960s. 

The error was understandable, though. The trappings of the feature — those alluring ray guns and rocket belts — were futuristic.