DC has a stab at reviving Adam Strange, with the creative team of Andy Diggle and Pascal Ferry.

Adam Strange is an odd character to try and bring back.  He's one of those heroes who's fondly remembered from many decades ago, and keeps getting dredged up because people won't let an old idea rest.  Let's be honest, the character is horribly dated.  Not only is he called "Adam Strange", but he carries a ray gun and flies around on a jet pack.  It's a vision of sci-fi adventure that went out of style forty years ago.

Oddly enough, that anachronism seems to play to the book's advantage.  Adam Strange has always struck me as a concept that doesn't really want to be in the DC Universe.  His central gimmick is that he has a normal life on Earth, but keeps getting teleported away to be a hero on the fantasy planet Rann.  Surely that's a much stronger idea if he's leaving behind a bland, normal life on Earth for occasional visits to enjoy high adventure on Rann - escapist fantasy made literal.  And it's undermined by placing him in the DCU, where Earth already is an escapist fantasy.  His world ought to be bland and grey - it shouldn't have a Superman flying around.

But as the DCU has become more and more tortured, and lost most of its escapist magic, Adam Strange starts to drift back into synch with the zeitgeist.  Now he gets to be the character who escapes from the fairly drab DCU of 2004 to visit the dayglo retro scifi of the fifties and sixties.  As the rest of the DCU has changed, the point of Adam Strange becomes a lot clearer - and the anachronisms of the character actually help with the idea that he harks back to a more innocent age.

All of which, I admit, is a bit of a gloss on the story, since Rann doesn't actually appear at all.  But the first issue seems to be playing off that kind of divide.  Poor Adam was just packing up and preparing to move to Rann permanently, only to find that the teleporter never came for him.  He finds himself stuck on earth, and eventually receives word that Rann has apparently been destroyed.  But, as the title of the storyline might perhaps suggest, all is not as it seems.  And while Earth is appropriately drab, flashbacks to Rann show it looking delightful as ever.  It doesn't look like we're heading for a modernised, downbeat Rann when it finally does show up.

Pascal Ferry, always an underrated artist, does some fabulous work on this issue.  His aerial combat scenes are excellent - this is how to combine energy with comprehensibility, something that's unfortunately all too rare.  Dave McCaig's colouring keeps Earth and Rann distinct without going too heavy on the primary colours.  And while Adam starts off as the depressed loser, you get the feeling that this isn't a revisionist tract - we're going to get a story about him recapturing the old magic.

This could actually work.  Well worth a look.

Rating: A

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