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.

November 1963: Intellectuals in Space

Having Adam Strange share a title with Hawkman put two of DC’s most intellectual heroes together.

Adam Strange always out-thought, rather than outfought, the menaces he ran into on Rann. And Hawkman and Hawkgirl’s Thanagarian Absorbsacon gave them telepathic access to all conscious knowledge on the planet Earth. The device enabled them to easily disguise themselves as museum staffers.

DC editor Julius Schwartz liked his characters to have smarts.

“(W)hen shown actually living on Earth, (Adam Strange) is usually in his penthouse apartment in New York, or in some museum: always an intellectual location of great sophistication,” Michael E. Grost observed. “(T)he main consequence of Hawkman’s alien origin is the flood of scientific devices he and Shiera have brought from Thanagar. Carter Hall also resembles Adam Strange in that he is a museum curator and Adam is an archaeologist who works for a museum. 

Hawkman had had two Brave and the Bold tryout runs, but hadn’t yet been awarded his own title. So he began to split a title with Adam Strange in Mystery in Space 87 (Nov. 1963). In this issue, their separate adventures were linked.

In the Adam Strange story, the redoubtable rocket man accidentally acquires a giant super-evolved brain, with some of the brain-wave energy becoming frozen into a rock which Strange teleports back to Earth with him.

The alien rock enhances the intelligence of the criminal Ira Quimby, enabling him to devise super-scientific tools and weapons. 

“He builds pinwheels that distort light, making him invisible or making it appear that people have become disembodied limbs floating in space,” wrote Carol Borden. “He also creates ‘air-cycles’ for his I.Q. Gang that look like they use paddle-boat technology so that the gang can fly over Midway City catching loot in butterfly nets. Quimby has also caused all gold objects at an exhibit to fly into the air.”

His flashy crime wave draws the attention of Hawkman and Hawkgirl, who put an end to it.

February 1963: Crowded by Cloud Creatures

Children tend to anthropomorphize their world, projecting human characteristics onto animals, cars, trains and even natural phenomena.

“As Piaget has shown, the child’s thinking remains animistic until the onset of puberty,” wrote Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. 

“His parents and teachers tell him that things cannot feel and act; and as much as he may pretend to believe this to please these adults, or not to be ridiculed, deep down the child knows better… The sun, the stone and the water are believed to be inhabited by spirits very much like people.”

“Subjected to the rational teachings of others, the child only buries his ‘true knowledge’ deeper in his soul and it remains untouched by rationality; but it can be formed and informed by what fairy tales have to say.”

And by what comic books have to say.

The Julius Schwartz-edited titles at DC Comics made good use of that childhood trait by investing various inanimate phenomena with sentience. 

Over at what would become Marvel, they were busy creating rock monsters, water monsters, fire monsters and so forth. And DC had a taste for cloud monsters.

In Mystery In Space 81 (Feb. 1963), writer Gardner Fox and artists Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson gave us The Cloud-Creature That Menaced Two Worlds!

In a convoluted plot, Adam Strange thwarts a thousand-year-old Rann despot Alva Xar while encountering a conjured duplicate of his fiancé Alanna, a mind-over-matter device called a cyberay and a cloud monster over Tasmania.

Because he’s holding the device, Adam discovers he can simply will the attacking cloud creature to vanish — another metaphor designed to wink at the fairy tale power of childhood imagination.

Even earlier, in The Flash 111 (Feb.-March 1960), writer John Broome and Infantino and Anderson gave us The Invasion of the Cloud Creatures! 

Adam Strange also had another anthropomorphized weather phenomenon for a recurring archenemy — the sentient whirlwinds called the Dust Devils.

May 1962: The Man Who Bested the Justice League

In Justice League of America 4 (April-May 1961), the Flash proposed Adam Strange for membership, despite the fact that no one on Earth appeared to be aware of the secret spaceman’s interplanetary heroics.

Readers who questioned this got their answer in Mystery in Space 75 (May 1962), and this prequel proved to be one of the better stories in the archeologist-adventurer’s run.

“Adam Strange teams up with the Justice League to fight Kanjar Ro, a villain who uses Rann's triple suns to give himself Superman-like powers,” noted comics historian Michael E.  Grost.  “This is a sequel to (Gardner) Fox's The Slave Ship of Space (Justice League of America 3, February-March, 1961). That tale introduced Kanjar Ro, and his battle with the Justice League.”

Kanjar Ro’s powers are, in fact, greater than Superman’s. Justice League superheroes throw themselves against him uselessly while the powerless Strange just stands around, seemingly at a loss.

In fact, Strange is concentrating on the problem at hand. 

Just as the alien despot is about to destroy him, Strange hurls one of Kanjar Ro’s old tools, instantly overcoming the tyrant. Strange had reasoned if material from Superman’s home planet weakened him, the same might be true for metal from Dhor, Kanjar Ro’s world.

Strange’s brains bested the JLA’s brawn, prompting Wonder Woman to remark, “To think I felt sorry for you, seeing you standing there — so helpless.”

The spaceman replies, “I had no super powers to fight with, so I had to take some time out and — think!”

As Mike W. Barr observed, “It’s hard not to be impressed by a guy with no super powers who nevertheless does a job the entire JLA can’t.”

“I've been so frequently disappointed by many of the modern day appearances of Adam, in which the writers downplay his intellect and basically just make him a Shoot-First-And-Ask-Questions-Later space cowboy,” wrote comics historian Gene Popa. “They clearly did not read and grasp his original stories, sad to say.”

February 1962: Lightning in a Zeta Beam

I am convinced that my life would be materially improved if I just had two things: a rocket belt and a ray gun.

However, the lesson of Adam Strange is that ray guns, rocket belts and pretty red fin-headed uniforms are finally useless when the menaces arrive. Only quick thinking really works.

“I've been so frequently disappointed by many of the modern day appearances of Adam, in which the writers downplay his intellect and basically just make him a Shoot-First-And-Ask-Questions-Later space cowboy, and in some instances he's actually portrayed as little more than a blundering fool,” observed comic book historian Gene Popa. “They clearly did not read and grasp his original stories, sad to say.

“Of all of the DC characters who have been 're-constructed' in the wake of Dark Knight, Adam has been perhaps the most sorely maligned.”

Adam Strange was lightning in a bottle, or a Zeta Beam, in terms of artist (Carmine Infantino), writer (Gardner Fox) and the feature’s jet-age moment in history. Because of the space race, science and reason were then being emphasized in America to a degree we have not, sadly, seen since.

In Mystery in Space 73 (Feb. 1962), Strange’s arrival on Rann coincides with an invisibility plague affecting everyone but him. The invisible alien warriors who caused it are seemingly immune to ray gun blasts. The sharp-eyed spaceman observes that the empty-uniformed warriors never risk hand-t0-hand combat, and deduces that the “warriors” are merely misdirection.

The real enemy must be elsewhere, and Strange tracks him down — a bit of multicolored energy ribbon named Ziathrion, a criminal scientist  from the planet Karthal.

The invulnerable Ziathrion gloats as he shrugs off the effects of all weapons, but then Strange seizes him just as the Zeta Beam is wearing off, and both are teleported to Earth. There, far from Rann’s triple sun, Ziathrion is vulnerable, just as Strange had reasoned.

The Champion of Rann leaves Ziathrion under a tree, forever inert.

Adam expresses confidence in his ability to solve any problem with reason. 

August 1961: The Dog in the Stars

Flying above an Antarctic snowfield, mere moments before being teleported to the planet Rann, Adam Strange spots a dog that’s about to be crushed in an icy avalanche.

Rocketing to the rescue, our hero grabs the husky. Both are instantly transported 4.5 light years away.

Rann is being menaced by the Kirri, an ancient blue-skinned humanoid race that has reappeared armed with irresistible ray-weapons that transform living beings into sentient water.

This time, it isn’t just Strange’s cool head that saves him, but also his kindness. 

After the Kirri encase him in ice, the archeologist-adventurer encourages the friendly husky to free him, enabling him to turn the tables on the blue meanies.

When both human and canine are drawn back to Earth, the scientist returns the husky to the meteorological research base where he lives.

The Menace of the Aqua-Ray Weapons (Mystery in Space 69, Aug. 1961) was written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Carmine Infantino.

“Despite the setting of an advanced alien civilization, the thing I always loved about Adam Strange stories was their evocation of the celebrated ‘plucky problem solvers’ of ages past,” Mark Engblom said. “Adam Strange was an archetypal warrior/ thinker/ mensch for the Space Age!”

Vincent Mariani wrote, “Adam Strange was a product of his time; the clean-cut comic book version of JFK’s ‘Best and Brightest’ analytical types. He reflected the era’s reverence for science bringing inevitable progress and prosperity via Gardner Fox's insertions of scientific tidbits in the service of otherwise strange concepts.

“He was also typical of the period in Julius Schwartz’s series. Adam Strange, Hal Jordan, Barry Allen and Ray Palmer were all sturdy, young, white, handsome technophiles. By the end of the sixties, diversity among superheroes exploded the stereotype.”

However, I see no reason why characters of any race or gender shouldn’t be rational ‘plucky problem solvers.’ I’m afraid the baby went out with the bath water. 

Even Mr. Spock has to have emotional outbursts now.

June 1961: Infantino’s Heroes

This DC house ad from June 1961 showcases two features that relied on the considerable talents of artist Carmine Infantino.

The Flash 121 gave us a return engagement with the merrily villainous Trickster, who’d been introduced a year before in Flash 113 (Danger in the Air!, June-July 1960).

Believe it or not, he was walking on air — and usually mocking the earthbound speedster. The blond, harlequin-costumed super-criminal drew my brightness-fascinated young eye and therefore my dime. The Trickster was caped, yellow-clad, flying — three things I loved.

Mystery in Space 68 was the first issue of that title I bought. I was fascinated by the Infantino-Murphy Anderson cover scene, which showed a horned alien tiger springing even as a colorful rocket-belted hero with a ray gun was teleported away, leaving behind a damsel in distress.

Much too much to resist.

And inside, even more! The issue introduced Strange’s recurring foes the Dust Devils — sentient, sinister, semi-anthropomorphic whirlwinds perfectly designed to inhabit the dreamlike mental landscape of a child.

Adam Strange was the thinking man’s superhero of the late 1950s, rendered with a sleek, space-age elegance by Infantino and written with a reassuring respect for intelligence by Gardner Fox.

But we were, in fact, approaching the end of an era, and Adam Strange’s loss would be Batman’s gain. In early 1964, Infantino would move on to revamp the flagging Batman titles, leaving Strange behind. By 1967, when Infantino also left the Flash feature, the best years of both characters were clearly behind them.

In June 1961, of course, we readers didn’t know it was the end of an era. But then, one rarely does.

April 1961: Far Planets and Lost Worlds

    In the Silver Age, The Flash almost served as a team-up book, with Kid Flash, the 1940s’ Flash, Elongated Man and Green Lantern frequently dropping in to share the Scarlet Speedster’s adventures. 

Land of the Golden Giants (The Flash 120, April 1961) offered a book-length adventure with Kid Flash, a character who’d been created 10 issues before.

“Wally West, Iris’ favorite nephew and president of the Blue Valley Chapter of the Flash Fan Club, was an instantly likeable fellow, due to a slightly tongue-in-cheek origin story including an exact duplication of the chemical accident that gave Barry his speed powers, as well as a heapin’ helpin’ of juvie jive and hipster slang that all us kookie cats in Comicsville could really dig!” wrote comics historian Michael Decker in The Flash Companion. “Clothed in an identical (but smaller) version of the Flash famous fighting fashions, Kid Flash graduated to his own back-up feature with the very next issue.”

In Golden Giants, the superheroes “… help a scientist prove his theories about Continental Drift,” noted comics historian Michael E. Grost. “This science fiction tale is full of unexpected twists and turns. In many ways, it starts out as another tale in the tradition of Conan Doyle's prose sf novel The Lost World (1912), with a scientific expedition going to the Guyana Highlands, just as in Doyle's novel. But Broome develops his plot in innovative ways.”

Meanwhile, in Challenge of the Giant Fireflies (Mystery In Space 67), Adam Strange’s fans got treated to two menaces for their dime — giant fireflies and sentient sun-beings.

“No movies from that pre-computer effects stone age could hope to match the designs, vistas and details of (artist Carmine) Infantino’s imaginative alien cityscapes and landscapes,” observed Robert Klein and Michael Uslan in The Adam Strange Archives. “Deadpan serious, even in the silliest situations, (writer Gardner) Fox and Infantino kept our disbelief firmly suspended while we visited Rann. Personal and character-driven, Adam’s adventures somehow felt believable.”

November 1960: Dragons and Dinosaurs

In We Fought the Earth’s Last Dragon (My Greatest Adventure 49, Nov. 1960), a locked trunk purchased at a Connecticut auction sends two treasure-hunting Yankees to Oregon’s Saddle Mountain — and a confrontation with a dragon.

One is greedy, the other responsible and altruistic, and they have to learn to work together to use the contents of a sorcerer’s strongbox to stop the menace they’ve unwittingly unleashed. Nick Cardy provides the art.

Meanwhile, over in Mystery in Space 63, Adam Strange is busy being turned into a gas and vacuumed up — very much the kind of peril that would plague the Flash, also drawn by Carmine Infantino.

Strange Adventures 121, my favorite issue of that title, featured stories by Gardner Fox — The Wand That Could Work Miracles, a “Space Museum” tale called The Billion-Year Old Spaceship and Invasion of the Flying Reptiles. All offered science fictional wish fulfillment.

A hole opens in time, releasing invulnerable pteranodans from a hundred million years ago over Washington, DC.

Yikes.

Luckily, a plucky husband-and-wife team of scuba-diving scientists, Jim and Rhoda Trent, have found a plesiosaur frozen in ice (Schwartz’s titles were always resolutely feminist, their female characters smart, stylish, cool-headed and brave).

Befriending the revived dinosaur, whom they nickname Ol’ Pleasure, the Trents — by offering themselves as bait on water skis — are able to use the plesiosaur to defeat the pteranondans.

My favorite part was the last panel, with the Trents happily tossing fish to their plesiosaur pal at a seaquarium. 

The story was probably popular, because the Trents returned to help giant undersea frog people in Strange Adventures 130 (July 1961). And the cover idea — flying dinosaurs coming through a hole in the sky — was recycled for Green Lantern 30, cover-dated July 1964. 

November 1960: The Riddle of the Rival Spacemen

Even when I was 6 years old, in 1960, I was clear on the fact that Space Ranger was only the second-best spaceman in the DC universe.

Over in Mystery in Space, Adam Strange had the advantage of stories by Gardner Fox and art by Carmine Infantino (who could not only make you believe the unbelievable, but make you believe the unbelievable to be sleek, tempered and elegant).

Space Ranger, the lead feature in Tales of the Unexpected, was delivered with the workmanlike art of Bob Brown and goofy-fun stories by Arnold Drake and Bob Haney.

DC’s two spaceman superheroes — one operating in the present, the other in the future — were actually created to be rival concepts and placed with rival editorial teams.

This house ad spotlights Tales of the Unexpected 55. In The Ghost Creatures of Phobos, Allied Solar Enterprises exec Rick Starr dons his Space Ranger disguise and, with his cute shape-shifting little pal Cryll, investigates reports of ghostly menaces on the Martian moon Phobos. The phantoms of monsters and Wellsian war machines turn out to be images reflected from the moon’s past for criminal purposes.

In Mystery in Space 63’s The Weapon That Swallowed Men, the green, cube-headed alien Vantor invade Rann with a weapon that turns people into gas.

“Carmine Infantino’s art is beautiful in this tale,” observed comics historian Michael E. Grost. “An early scene shows ruins of Sumuru, the first city on Rann. The walls of the ruins are made up of numerous irregularly sized rectangular blocks... They form an imaginative and unusual variation on Infantino's Art Deco architecture.”

And in House of Mystery 104’s The Seeing-Eye Man, a scientist’s “retriever ray” pulls an alien spaceship to a crash landing on Earth. He’s pressed into service leading the temporarily blinded, telepathic alien Zod, and cleverly thwarts the alien’s plan to conquer Earth.

July 1958: Totalitarians from the Stars

In Mystery in Space 45 (Aug. 1958), Gil Kane’s cover spotlights the story Flying Saucers Over Mars by writer Joe Millard and artist Carmine Infantino.

“Martians begin to see flying saucers in the sky, which they suspect are from Earth,” wrote comics historian Michael E. Grost. “Amusing role reversal story, with many ingenious twists. The story takes place entirely on Mars. The Martians are friendly, normal beings, and not at all the monsters they were sometimes depicted in prose SF and movies. There is perhaps a bit of a political allegory here: people in other countries and other races are a lot like us.”

Inside the issue is a house ad for a new hero, Space Ranger, who would soon take over as the cover feature of DC’s Tales of the Unexpected.

Meanwhile, one year later — in August 1959 — Adam Strange would become the cover feature for Mystery in Space.

And the Adam Strange formula is anticipated in Strange Adventures 94 (July 1958).

The story Elevator to the Future! (writer Gardner Fox, artist Murphy Anderson) features a protagonist who, like Strange, is whisked away to an alien environment by fantastic means, and manages to resolve a crisis there.

Proofreader Tom Jackson steps off the elevator in his office building and finds himself in the future, where he helps free humanity from alien control.

“(T)he aliens are motivated by the same forces that cause 20th Century Earth dictators such as Hitler and Stalin to enslave people,” Grost observed. “Stories like this are about the terrible menace of totalitarianism, a subject that weighed deeply on the minds of people in 1958. This whole approach is typical of Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures.”

January 1958: Strange Mysteries of Other Planets

Even in the superhero desert of the 1950s, a lot of comic book stories might be described as “superhero adjacent.”

Super powers never really went out of fashion, only costumed crusading did for a while.

For example, take the story Bodyguard from Space! (Strange Adventures 88, Jan. 1958). Writer Gardner Fox and artist Carmine Infantino give us a tale about an alien visitor from the planet Klysistron who can levitate objects, turn invisible and intangible and communicate telepathically. He announces that he has “journeyed across three billion light years of space” to protect news cameraman Jim Carson. Unknown to himself, Carson carries telepathically implanted information vital to revitalizing the alien planet’s dying sun.

Meanwhile, over in Mystery in Space 42 (March 1958), writer John Broome and artist Sid Greene provide us with Mail Rider to the Stars, an interstellar version of the Pony Express.

“A lone rocket pilot delivers mail to far-flung planets, despite all obstacles,” recalled comics historian Michael E. Grost. “It is notable for being one of the first depictions of a ‘black hole’ in fiction.

“Probably one of the best features of this story is Sid Greene’s art. There is some of his distinctive future architecture. One tower has a spiral ramp around it, reaching to its top.

“There are also some good shots of the rocket ship zooming around through the asteroids. The combination of the curving lines of the rocket exhaust and the circles of the asteroids makes for some pleasing visual patterns. Such scenes of space flight often recur in Greene’s tales.”

The issue includes The Dual Identity World by Greene and writer Otto Binder. “This is another Binder mystery about a hard-to-interpret planet: here two explorers literally see the world in two different ways,” Grost reported. “This is a most ingenious tale. It has elements of an allegory and a fable, and should be better known: it would make a great proverb, to illustrate some important ideas about perception.”