If I rated comics in terms of how many times a smile crossed my face as I read it, Adam Strange would earn my highest grade. Since that's only part of the rating, and I also grade in terms of artwork, storytelling craft and interesting plot, Adam Strange does earn my highest grade. Not only is this shaping up to be one of the most fun comics on the market, it's one of the most beautiful and one of the most interesting, tackling a character and subgenre that would seem hopelessly outdated in 2004 but is instead modern and flashy without losing all of its retro charm. Diggle and Ferry follow up on the promise of an aerial dogfight in this issue, play up Adam Strange's role as a thinking man hero and set him on a course for adventure in the all-too-rarely explored space of the DC Universe.
Adam Strange is not an easy character to tackle. His jetpack and blaster wearing spaceman is an artifact of the '50s and '60s, when space exploration was brand new and a lot more mysterious, cool and optimistic. The guy has a fin on his head, for God's sake! Diggle and Ferry have taken this character and nailed the universal qualities of the character - his can-do attitude, his action-hero smarts and strength - and after they've grabbed the reader with those universals, only then do the more goofy aspects of the character resurface.
These creators don't feel the need to downplay or act embarrassed about these aspects (which are, ironically, part of what make him unique and viable as a character), they instead use them to make the character even cooler. A guy using a jetpack can easily be a doofy '50s sci-fi homage, but when you've got him flying through the streets of Gotham fighting a killer "robot", desperately trying to stay one step ahead so he can figure out what happened to his life? That's cool. The red and white, fin on head garb can also look dorky, but Ferry's slight redesign keeps everything that made the look a classic while updating it for a more modern space-faring look. Oh, and zeta beam teleportation and the planet Rann and all that stuff? Again, can be goofy, but when it's played like warp drive, and we see the dangers of deep space and a planet having been exploded, it comes across as more modern and cool.
What really got me about Adam Strange, though, wasn't just that Diggle and Ferry nailed the essence of the character while making him accessible to a modern audience. No, unsurprisingly given that Diggle writes one of the best action comics on the stands for Vertigo, what gets me is the action in this book. Diggle and Ferry deliver a beautiful, tense aerial dogfight over and through the streets of Gotham to open the book, and they keep Adam Strange in motion throughout the book. He's a thinker, but Strange never stops to mope or pontificate, he's always moving as he's thinking, blasting his way out of a tight situation so that he can get to what's important, saving the girl and saving the day. He's a pulp hero archetype, and while the storytelling is very modern, the two-fisted brainy adventurer that Diggle is writing remains very much a pulp hero.
There are any number of small things that made me smile in Adam Strange. The pilots betting on whether or not an anomaly was "longjohns" or not. That beautiful splash of Adam shooting it out with a "robot" in the skies over Gotham. The hard-boiled interrogation of said "robot" by Adam Strange. The cop taking statements about the outlandish happenings. The nifty new tech that Adam has in his gear. The in-joke of Adam referring to his dilemma as a "Mystery in Space." But it's all of these small things, brought together into a tightly-paced, beautiful-looking adventure that makes it one of the best comics I've read all month. 10/10
