Review: Tom Strong Deluxe Edition Book 2 or how Tom Strong saved me from my own worst enemy

24 June 2010

Gerard Wood

It can’t often be said with anything like a straight face that the hero of a graphic novel has reached out from the page to touch the real world. But here I am with only the hint of a smile to state in all sincerity that Tom Strong saved me from my own worst enemy.

Yes, indeed, Tom Strong saved me from myself and a villainous prejudice against the graphic novel.

Not until I’d been strong-armed into reading Alan Moore’s Tom Strong did I come to appreciate the potential of the graphic novel for narrative sophistication, biting humour, even social and political commentary, and above all else, great fun! The graphic novel is a hybrid art-form marrying the artistry of the illustrator with the storytelling of the author and at its best it is greater than the sum of these parts. If there was ever any justification for my prejudice against the graphic novel (and it’s one I know a lot of you share), it’s that it’s rare for things to come together perfectly, but that’s no less true of any other art-form. And when it does come together perfectly, as it does with Tom Strong, it’s a magical experience.

To really appreciate how utterly absurd this prejudice is, consider my passion for the writing of Neil Gaiman. Since first encountering Gaiman’s 2001 novel American Gods, I’ve devoured every story, short and long, that he has published and yet for years I turned my nose up at his acclaimed graphic novels. Graphic novels were jumped-up comics with delusions of grandeur, I thought, and while “readers” of Playboy could at least pretend to be interested in the articles, “readers” of comics had no such defence as the writing was so god-awful. Alan Moore’s Tom Strong proved how wrong I was and from there I made my way to Moore’s seminal graphic novel, Watchmen, and then to where it all began for Gaiman with Sandman. My only regret is that it took me so long to find my way there.

In reviewing Book 1 of the Tom Strong Deluxe Edition I made the point that reading twelve issues in a single volume is an ideal way to appreciate Moore's storytelling virtuosity and the varied artistic styles of Chris Sprouse and others. This is no less true of Book 2, which collects issues 13 to 24 and which hit bookstores in April. Reading them all between the covers of a single book makes the story arc all the more apparent and draws out the themes which weave their way through the separate issues.

If any one quality could be said to characterise the storytelling in Book 1 it would be the gloriously complex narrative, with Moore exploiting multiple interweaving plot lines and points of view, flashbacks and forwards. In Book 2 it’s time and alternate realities that come to dominate the storytelling. Younger and older versions of Tom join forces with each other and sometimes with incarnations of himself from other dimensions and realities fighting the same eternal battle. All of which is highly reminiscent of Michael Moorcock’s fiction and cosmology in which the Eternal Champion exists across multiple realities, and it is little surprise that Moorcock came to work with Moore on issues 31 and 32 (look for these in Tom Strong Deluxe Edition Book 3).

Throughout Book 2 Moore casts an ever more critical eye over the character of Tom Strong. It commences with a fairly harmless caricature in Issue 14, but from Issue 15 the scalpel cuts a little deeper. To this end, one theme in particular comes to the foreground: things are rarely what they seem, motives are almost never black and white, and an aggressive response to a perceived threat is frequently misguided. It’s there again in Issue 16, Some Call Him The Space Cowboy, when a sinister gun-toting three eyed stranger moseys into town on his uranium fuelled space-travelling steed, Thunder. Tom assumes the worst. He is mistaken.

This critique of Tom is at its most sophisticated and entertaining in Issues 20 to 22, beginning with How Tom Stone Got Started. Time split into two distinct lines at the moment when Tom’s parents set out on their sea voyage for Attabar Teru. In one reality, Susan gives birth to a child fathered by the brilliant but cold scientist Sinclair Strong; in the other, Sinclair dies on the voyage out to Attabar Teru and Susan finds love with Tomas Stone, the West Indian Captain of the ship. Their son Tom Stone is all the hero that his alter-ego Tom Strong is and something more. Where Strong’s upbringing was severe and unnatural and marked by tragedy, Stone’s was characterised by love and affection and his nature is warmer and more sympathetic as a result. Rather than taking the fight to villains like Saveen, Stone is able to reform them and work with them for the greater good.

This criticism of Strong is all the more remarkable if you consider that Moore appears to have created his Science hero in part at least as a reaction to the mindless violence and blood-lust that came to dominate comic books in the 1980s. Moore knows that violence can’t be swept under the carpet and Tom Strong doesn’t hesitate to take the fight to the enemy, but time and again, when the dust settles, Tom has applied reason, compassion and understanding to resolve an encounter.

But even then, Strong is not above criticism. He is flawed. His upbringing by a cold father driven to raise a child by pure reason has created a man who thinks and acts with rigidity, in terms of right and wrong, reason and unreason, black and white. And it seems that it is this inflexibility, not the criminality of people like Paul Saveen, which guarantees conflict.

Tom Strong Deluxe Edition Book 2 is the second of three over-sized hard cover volumes to collect all 36 issues in the Tom Strong sequence. It hit bookstores in April and is highly recommended, especially for those of you who still think that graphic novels are simply jumped-up comics with delusions of grandeur…

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