Strange Adventures #10 - "You rule supreme."

[laughing_tree]

I feel like all our fantasies are being crushed constantly. What we thought our country was, what we thought our safety was. All these myths I had growing up as a kid, I'm just throwing out the window each day. I want to write a book about the myths of them and what it's like to lose them. -- Tom King

Comments

[deh_tommy]

Next time in comics, Tom King tackles Scooby-Doo, where Fred has been mystery solving for so long he can’t function in normal society, him and Daphne have sex every other issue, Velma suffers from crippling anxiety and Shaggy’s love of food is actually an eating disorder borne from trying to cope with the trauma of facing down horrifying monsters and near-death scenarios on a weekly basis.

[scorntx]

Isn't that first one basically Mystery Incorporated Fred anyway?

[deh_tommy]

Mystery Incorporated Fred was a lovable eccentric who had a genuine passion for mystery solving. This would a Fred who’s been out at war (so to speak) for so long that home is no longer home and mysteries are the only thing that make sense anymore.

[tcampbell1000]

I mean, depends on the episode and how you look at him. Spoilers: poor guy had an adoptive dad who was a transparently self-interested, corrupt politician, later revealed as a criminal baby-snatcher. His birth parents were actually even worse (at least "Mayor Dad" loved him and was proud of him, in the final analysis). And then, in the final episode, he's given a much healthier family history, but one he doesn't remember having lived.

The show consistently mined Fred's obsessions for laughs. Its creative boldness was always tempered by the knowledge that it couldn't get too dark for very long. But I do feel it was suggesting that without the great loves in his life--traps, mysteries, BFFs, Daphne--Fred would be one bad afternoon away from being homeless under a bridge, trying to broker peace with the pigeons he's convinced are aliens. Shaggy could be a chef or a low-key layabout, Scooby'd be fine just being a well-fed dog, Velma could be pretty much anything, and Daphne just needed to find an area to excel that was her own, not her sisters'. But Fred? Fred really, really needed Mystery, Incorporated.

I suspect, though, that if you gave Tom King the Mystery, Inc. characters to play with, they'd take the Mister Terrific role in this story, not the Adam Strange one. In their best renditions, that's their thing: they unmask the reality behind the myth, even if sometimes, the truth hurts.

[donnblake]

Scooby-Doo, like Peter Pan, is really one of those properties where, to come up with a dark retelling, you can just let the premise play out faithfully without deciding ahead of time that the result will be light and family-friendly. Which makes it a little baffling to me when adaptations feel the need to put them in a post apocalyptic hellscape where Scooby's an escaped lab experiment and Velma's a mad scientist, or have Peter enslaved by an evil shadow.

[nyadnar17]

I remember Mark Ward talking about writing for Archie. And how this lazy, acceptable for teenagers and not many people else, form for writing was exactly what he would never do.

[scorntx]

Anyone else curious to see how Tom King would handle My Little Pony?
No?

(I suppose the internet already has no shortage of "they're actually all secretly depressed and terrible" fics anyhow.)

[coldfury]

"The friendship was, in fact, not magic."

[silverhammerman]

There's more to this, but I can't stop thinking "See? They wanted us to commit war crimes against them, so they could weaken our American Rannian spirit!"

I still suspect a further twist to come, but I guess it's interesting at least.

Context just makes it worse

[blue_bolt]

The context in the comic is that the Pykt told Adam Strange to commit war crimes against them on Rann because it made him look like a stronger ally to earth.

You are actually taking a more charitable interpretation than the author intends. I'm not kidding, the message here is that humans are more likely to trust a war criminal on the basis of how strong their hatred is, than to distrust the war criminal for crossing immoral lines.

So to restate what you put: "See? They wanted him to commit war crimes against them, so they could strengthen our faith and American spirit!"

So basically, humans are bastards who elevate what they should shun.

Re: Context just makes it worse

[lordultimus]

Wasn't Adam committing war crimes covered up by the Rannians? Hell, didn't the Rannians try to cover up the Pykkts being sapient?

[nyadnar17]

"I feel like all our fantasies are being crushed constantly. What we thought our country was, what we thought our safety was. All these myths I had growing up as a kid, I'm just throwing out the window each day. "

Is this really how straight white men view the world?

[deh_tommy]

Maybe I’m missing something, but why single out straight white men?

[thezmage]

Because people less privileged than straight white men tend not to have the same myths. As the saying goes, cosmic horror and dystopian stories are when the privileged start being treated the way as the unprivileged.

[nyadnar17]

Because for every other group life seems to have been steadily improving by most metrics?

Not saying things are getting worse for straight white men, but its just about the only group I can think of that might readily jump into a time machine if one where available. AFAIK there is more acceptancy, opportunity, representation, whatever for pretty much every other group now than there has ever been.

I also am hard pressed to think of any other group of people that had illusions about America's warts.

[numeronone]

Tom King Comics: because why invest in the comic medium's visual potential when you can just superimpose a lot of prose over several lifeless images