Alanna learns the full truth of what really happened during the Pykkt invasion of Rann – and learns in a letter from Mr. Terrific that her husband has been keeping some major secrets from her. What happens when the story of her husband meets the cold, hard, and awful truth of what he’s done? Strange Adventures #10 is written by Tom King, art by Mitch Gerads and Evan “Doc” Shaner, lettering by Clayton Cowles.
Well, it happened. Major spoilers for Strange Adventures lie ahead.
In what is just one issue shy of me being able to feel clever about calling it the eleventh hour, Strange Adventures has finally revealed the big secret that the book’s been teasing right from the start, letting us know that the question we’ve been asking all along is the wrong one. The question isn’t whether Adam Strange is a war hero or a war criminal – the question is, what can a man get away with when the propaganda of two worlds *needs* him to be their hero?
The truth Mr. Terrific has been teasing out is this: the galaxy conquering Pykkts made a deal with Adam Strange – allow him to win the war on Rann, and he would give them Earth. He would even give them his daughter, Aleea, as collateral, faking her death to cover up his betrayal. Every Pykkt death he was responsible from that point on – every war crime, every outburst of hatred towards them – all meant to erase any possible doubt that he could be working with them. It seems like an unnecessarily convoluted plot for the Pykkts, bending over backwards and allowing so many of their own to die just to make an Earth invasion a little easier. It’s possible the book has a few more revelations up its sleeves, but it’s more likely that the Pykkts aren’t the point – the point is that Tom King has given us another story about a man broken by the world, and the loving, morally flexible wife who enables him to get through it.
“Enables” being the key word here. While Alanna clearly idolizes her husband, she’s also shown no trouble, or even hesitancy, at lying for him – showing clear contempt for anyone who sees her husband as anything less than an absolute hero. She’s swept his flaws, his mistakes, his irredeemable crimes under the rug time and time again, because the truth is less important than the story – but everything has its breaking point.
Reveals like this often serve to recontextualize everything that’s come before, so I took this opportunity to reread the whole series, asking myself: how much does the story change now that I know what it’s been leading up to? It turns out, a lot.
I’ve expressed how frustrated I’ve been with this series’ withheld answers. I’m doubly frustrated now, because now that I *have* those answers – or at least the big ones – it’s clearer than ever to me that Strange Adventures was never a mystery story, despite being framed like one. There is a murder, and a secret that’s clearly being kept hidden, but our investigator Mr. Terrific isn’t the one to unfold the story. The clues he finds, he keeps to himself, his conclusions held closely to the chest right up until this issue. In a proper mystery, backstory is revealed one clue at a time, but here, flashbacks happen regardless of what Mr. Terrific does – even Adam’s confession to the murder happens more or less on its own, without Terrific’s direct intervention, yet this mystery is the story’s hook. I’ve spent over a year with this pervasive sense of anxiety in every issue, waiting for the other shoe to drop, all because it wasn’t clear until now that the protagonist of this story isn’t Mr. Terrific, or even Adam Strange – it’s Alanna.
That was the second thing that the reread made clear, and I’ll admit, missing this is on me. Through the series, we’ve gotten more insight into, and page time with Alanna than anyone else, which is why I appreciate how much this issue focused on just her. I normally don’t enjoy when we have captions running along panels they have nothing to do with – unless the juxtaposition is particularly thematic, I can’t always hold two concepts in my head and the practice ends up diluting the impact of both. But here, the captions are the entirety of Mr. Terrific’s letter to Alanna, which she’s shown reading at the start of this issue. It’s easy to imagine, as she goes through her day, that the words of his letter are constantly running through her head. It’s not that we’re not being given a glimpse into her mind – we are, and they’re all Terrific’s words. As she jetpacks around Washington, running PR propaganda for her husband’s sake and smiling for the cameras, she’s also mulling over how much of this is based on a lie.
One of the more meta mysteries running through the series is just where the Doc Shaner sections of the story were coming from. At first, the theatrical Golden Age speech patterns building up the heroes and damning their enemies seemed to indicate that these stories were excerpts from Adam’s book – an idealized version of what really happened, polished up for a public desperate for the good old fashioned heroism of yore. That theory was shot down last issue, however, when Shaner illustrated Adam’s use of biological weapons, and the execution of prisoners – something that was supposed to be kept a secret and could not have been in the book. This issue seems to make it clear, however, that these idealized memories of the past? They’re Alanna’s. The story she built up in her head. And as she flies home, thinking back to how Rann’s apparent hard-earned victory was nothing but a lie, Shaner’s art fades to a rough sketch as Alanna is forced to confront how much of her history with Adam she’s fabricated.
Mitch Gerads’ Alanna is exquisite. I’m not just talking about how he draws an incredibly beautiful woman, perfectly lit, staring out at you from the page, asking you to celebrate heroism the American way. It’s the emotion he captures in her face. The repressed care with which she applies her make-up. The rage that’s left when the mask is gone, and she’s forced to face herself in the bathroom mirror. Contrasted with the exhilarated thrill that Shaner’s Alanna has when she sees the approaching end of the Pykkt invasion – Shaner’s idealism vs. Gerads more grounded illustrations is a combination I would like to be unreservedly thrilled about, but can’t, because the story’s overall framing got in the way of me being able to enjoy it properly.
Let’s put aside that Strange Adventures irredeemably corrupts a classic, if relatively obscure, character for the sake of its story. There’s a lot of justifiable rage about that, and this issue doesn’t make things any easier. What makes me mad is how much it turns out I love this story – the themes it attempts to wrestle with, the fabled feel of its past and the examination of a protagonist who is *really* growing on me. The consistently *breathtaking* illustrations, and the contrast the art team is bringing out. Tom King has given me a story I didn’t know I loved – and he’s ruined the telling of it.
