"The Terrible True Life of Tom Strong" Parts 1 and 2

[starwolf_oakley]

Ed Brubaker wrote two issues of TOM STRONG, the Alan Moore series. And Brubaker's story... really took a mean shot at Alan Moore.



Tom Strong and his daughter, Tesla, is tracking down one of his old foes. And I do mean "old."





Tom punches the crown and it breaks. He goes home, there's an impromptu parade, and everything is right with the world. Or...



And then he wakes up.









Interesting.

The next issue has Tom Samson talking to the doctor, and how he keeps finding himself in different spots around Millenium City with no idea how he got there. And one of those spots is his doctor's office... where he realized the doctor doesn't have any other patients. The doctor whines he was forced to do... something.

He goes to a military base that looks a lot like the Stronghold. So, he starts to learn about Project: Miracleman. I mean, Project: Strongman. Why would I say Miracleman? We aren't talking about Miracleman. What's Miracleman?















Tom Strong smashes the crown. Telsa says how Tom "went bug-eyed for a few minutes."



It is a little unusual that Ed Burbaker would "Take the mick" out of an Alan Moore story... in another series Alan Moore created and wrote most of!

Or... Is it? Alan Moore himself has said WATCHMEN came from "a bad mood" he was in back in the 1980s. Was MIRACLEMAN also an example of that "bad mood?" Was most of Moore's most popular stories just dark and depressing to be dark and depressing, without any other reason? And so many other writers are "chasing that" to be popular? Thus giving us "Superheroes are bad, and you should feel bad" as Standard Operating Procedure.

Comments

[mrstatham]

"Was most of Moore's most popular stories just dark and depressing to be dark and depressing, without any other reason?"

No. Even if that period of Moore's writing is the result of a 'bad mood', the quality of of the writing speaks for itself, and there's clearly more going on than just the story being dark and depressing - Watchmen isn't *really* that dark, and I never really get depressed reading it like I do, say, mid-00's Batdickery; I'd argue Watchmen is actually the 'mature' that most 'mature readers' comics are trying to be when they earn that rating. And I can't really blame Moore that X amount of lesser writers decided to ride his coattails and apply his sort of characterisation - which he and Gibbons made their own universe for, after all - to characters who should have maintained that sort of... Well, maybe not innocence or naivety, but more the mood that they had, pre-1980-something.

[darkknightjrk]

I don't know if the two really compare. I mean, the mid-00s Batdickery stuff, Batman is still a hero, someone who saves the day, he's just very, very, VERY flawed.

Watchmen's whole purpose and idea is that all superheroes are either fetishists for fascists.

[baihu]

Honestly, for the gloom and doom that people associate with Alan Moore, he's really a lot more optimistic about things in his works. Guess it's tempered with some cynical realism, but overall in stuff like Top 10, Tom Strong, even Watchmen, you can tell there's a thread about some inherent goodness in the world, just he also shows the really bad.

Except Neonomicon, I don't know wtf was going on in THAT. Heard he said it was mostly for cash, but ugh, violent pointless Lovecraft porn meh.

[leoboiko]

It took a lot of time for me to understand what was this post going about with the "mean shot", what's with Alan Moore's Tom Strong and Cobweb and Promethea and the rest all begin so bright and colorful and fantasylike. The moral of the story above seems to me like something that Alan could have written. Actually he did use just this trope, towards the end of (mild spoilers) Promethea.

Apparently most people still associate Moore with the 80s Watchmen and think of him as an ally of grimdark, instead of a professed enemy of it?

(And yeah, except Neonomicon. What's up with that, it was awful.)

[baihu]

Yeah, if this post didn't point it out, I didn't realize Moore didn't want this particular story in Tom Strong. When I read it, I thought it par for the course with the entire tone of Tom Strong, which is life is good and full of wonder.

And the ending of Tom Strong (plus I guess with Promethea as well?) was both the most meta and most satisfying ending I've ever felt for a comic story, or any story almost. "Life goes on" is a wonderful message to end on.

[drexer]

Adding a bit to what was said above, I've got to ask, what was exactly the supposed "mean shot" that Brubaker directed at Moore?

I mean, Brubaker is clearly working with concepts that Moore explored before, and drawing a parallel between Miracleman's portrayal of life versus the optimism of Tom Strong, but that's not necessarily an adversarial or confrontational perspective.

We're talking here about professional writers, it's kind of mean to characterize them as warring teenagers instead of adults playing of each others works and thoughts.

[starwolf_oakley]

Well, I first read about this story on "TV Tropes" under "Biting the Hand Humor."

Biting-the-Hand Humour: Ed Brubaker's two-issue story is a parody of Moore's Miracleman, which generally attacks the Darker and Edgier deconstructed superhero genre it initiated as pointlessly bleak for the sake of it.

So it probably isn't really "mean."

[q99]

Pretty good, though the idea that no place like that could even exist seems like a stretch. Tom's run into some very bad places, after all.

[lordultimus]

Well, I don't know if he's ever been to a place where the sky is ALWAYS grey. Meteorology is too complicated for that.

Now a place where there are politicians that aren't liars, THAT sounds like fantasy!

[q99]

Ah yea, point. If it's too constantly dreary, that doesn't come off so well in the short, but isn't exactly real.

~~
I do find it odd that politicians is supposed to be a difference. I mean, reading Tom Strong and Top Ten, one doesn't get the impression things are that different.