Bill Roper's Journal

Did I mention that I'm a fan of Adam Strange?

Not the vast majority of the deconstructionist Adam Strange stories that have been written since Alan Moore passed by the character, to be sure. I want Adam to be a hero. And I have come up with a framework that allows him to be one, which I was sharing with my friend, Sam, over the weekend.

My theory is that the civilization on Rann (which is the planet of Alpha Centauri that Adam Strange travels to in best ERB-like fashion) is old. And static. And virtually everyone on the planet is completely lacking in problem solving skills, because the great machines that their ancestors built supply their every need and are self-repairing.

Except after some untold number of generations, the machines are breaking down. Oops. The things that the machines defended the planet from, whether natural disaster or critter from outer space, are breaking through. This is a bad thing for the people of Rann.

The last scientist on the planet (because, really, why would you need scientists in this utopia?) invented the Zeta beam and aimed it at Earth, hoping to establish communications with the more primitive people just one star system away. But he didn't account for the effects of cosmic radiation on the beam, which converted it from a communication beam to a teleportation beam. Surprise!

Enter Adam Strange, archeologist, who is picked up by the beam and taken to Rann. There he meets the lovely daughter of the last scientist. And unlike everyone else on the planet, Adam Strange has actual problem solving skills. (The scientist and the daughter are trainable. Everyone else is hopeless.)

You may not think of problem-solving skills as a super-power. I invite you to think of some of your co-workers and reconsider that.

And this is why Adam Strange becomes the champion of Rann.

At least, that's *my* take on it.

And I am now visualizing this as a movie starring Paul Rudd. Because it would be a *good* movie.

Anyway, given all that, I wrote a song about it.

And I now have an entry in my personal songbook with a title starting with the letter Z.

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

This post was prompted by seeing Wesley Crowell buy the recent "Strange Adventures" collection at GAFilk, which features Adam Strange, who is an old favorite character of mine who I feel has been badly mistreated over the years by various writers. In the original series, Adam was caught by accident in the Zeta Beam and teleported to Rann, a planet in the Alpha Centauri system where he had a series of adventures in the tradition of John Carter of Mars. He defended the planet against a plethora of sfnal menaces, quite successfully, with his Rannian ray gun and rocket pack. It was an enormous lot of fun.

Of course, this was not going to survive the deconstructionist era of comic book writing. Clearly, Adam Strange was not on the same level as the advanced Rannian civilization -- he was much more akin to an ape-man, so obviously he wasn't really a hero. Maybe he was just breeding stock to introduce new genes into the pool. (If the Rannians really needed that, one would think the advanced civilization could manage a bit of genetic engineering, but apparently not.)

I have become tired of this. And it was while I was sitting there at GAFilk that I realized that Adam Strange actually *does* have a superpower, one that the Rannians lack.

Adam Strange has problem solving skills. Really *good* problem solving skills.

Now, these seem to be rare enough among Earthlings. Among Rannians, they are simply unknown. The Rannians, for all of their scientific development, are absolutely terrible at dealing with novel situations, so when they have to deal with a Dust Devil, they have *no idea whatsoever* of what to do to make the problem go away. *Adam*, on the other hand, takes various items of Rannian technology and whatever else he has available and just MacGyvers the Dust Devil away.

The more I thought about this, the more sense that it made in context. Alpha Centauri A is a billion years older than the Sun, but Rann is barely more advanced than Earth in terms of technology. Given another 1000 years, Earth will be way ahead of them. That's because the people on Rann take *forever* to come up with something new. Heck, look at Sardath, Rann's greatest scientific mind. He came up with the Zeta Beam to communicate with other planets. It was *pure blind luck* that cosmic radiation converted his communication beam into a teleportation beam. It is probably *pure blind luck* that is responsible for *every* new technological development on Rann, because these people have no problem solving skills whatsoever.

And so this is why Adam Strange becomes Rann's indispensable hero. He isn't *smarter* than anyone else, but he is able to solve the problem.

I wish someone at DC would write *that* story.

We grilled some bratwurst and made some sweet corn for dinner today; then watched fireworks on TV. It seemed appropriate for the day.

Meanwhile, for the first time in a *very* long time, I was not on deadline for some project that had to be completed by a fixed date. And this meant that I could embark on making a big mess.

A bit over two years ago, I fell off the wagon reading my comic books here at home. This was partly because I *also* fell off the wagon of sorting the series into order so they could actually be *read* in order, which is a pretty useful thing given the nature of modern comic book story telling. And if you can't figure out where you left off, you can't start again.

Today, Gretchen cleared off the dining room table, and I piled up all of the unread, unsorted comic books into similar groups. There were about eleven enormous piles on the table at one point.

There is one pile left to be fine sorted. But that is enough for today.

I think I will finish "Doomsday Clock" now.

Crisis on Infinite Earths finally wrapped up tonight on the CW. There were things I expected and things that I didn't expect, all of which is probably good.

We will now see how things sort out. :)

Avengers 3 has finally wended its way to Netflix and Gretchen and I watched it tonight. My capsule review is that it's a bit of a muddled mess with a whole lot of fighting going on.

I think we are *way* past the point of having to worry about spoilers. So I'm just going to say this.

I think that there's some possibility that Avengers 4 is going to provide a workaround to the expiring contracts problem for Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, and Chris Hemsworth, who play Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor. See, the problem is that you *can* do an MCU without those three heroes. But do you really *want* to? I don't think so. And we've already gone around the "Let's promote their sidekicks to wear the uniform" route in the comics with very little long-term success.

Except the fans are going to beat you up if you try to recast the parts. What to do, what to do?

It's pretty obvious that Avengers 4 is going to have *some* kind of temporal reset. Well, what if the temporal reset is imperfect and the result is that Downey, Evans, and Hemsworth are left outside the time stream when it gets rebuilt with new actors playing Iron Man, Cap, and Thor? Dr. Strange is, of course, aware of this and helps them shuffle off to heroic Valhalla of one kind or another.

And the recasting becomes part of the overall lore of the MCU. It might not stop fans from complaining, but it would be a neat bit of sleight of hand.

It's a thought...

Gretchen and I finished off the first season of this show tonight. We rather liked it and are looking forward to next season.

Although after the final scene aired, Gretchen turned to me and said, "So you're taking me out for a beer and explaining what just happened, right?"

So I'm looking for a comic book cover and I'm beginning to believe that this particular cover does not exist and that I have cobbled it together from bits and pieces of memory. I'm looking for three heroes standing over the body of a dead hero on a sparse, almost empty yellow background. It has a very Golden Age feel to it, but there were so damned few teams in the 40s that it's fairly easy to eliminate almost every existing cover.

I've plowed through All-Star and All-Winners. I've checked Comics Cavalcade and World's Finest. I've even checked Flash Comics on the off-chance of something with Flash and Hawkman. Lots of empties.

Then I checked early Silver Age and came up empty through Justice League of America and Avengers. And X-Men. And Doom Patrol, in a fit of desperation. Not even Mystery In Space.

Not Astro City being particularly retro either.

*grumble*

I got a pass from my lovely bride to go catch a late evening show of Ant-Man. I enjoyed it greatly. It was pretty much everything that an old Ant-Man fan might hope for. I suspect those less well-versed in the history of the MU will enjoy it too.

High points:

Paul Rudd does a fine job as Scott Lang.

Michael Douglas does a fine job as an older Hank Pym.

Hank Pym does not get crapped on by the writers. (After what has happened in the MU over the years, this was in some doubt.)

I happened to catch a 3-D show. For this film, it was worth it. Some of the shots reminded me of the original Tron.

Yes, I am old. :)

Good script.

Good effects.

And a Hayley Atwell cameo.

So what's not to like?

So the freestanding wicker cabinet over the toilet in our bathroom had the bottom shelf come partly loose last week. A second screw had come loose on that side, the first screw was completely missing, and the shelf was just a bit askew. Earlier this week, I'd picked up slightly larger screws as replacements, but there'd been no chance to fix the shelf during the week, because it had been very, very busy.

daisy_knotwise had hied off to a wedding shower this morning, so after I took Katie and Julie to lunch and watched them vanish into a playland of little girls upon coming home, I decided to prep the shelf. This meant removing all of the assorted comic books that were piled on it (and a smaller pile of sports magazines) that were all waiting to be read.

The sports magazines have become stale enough that I should just discard most of them, but they were the smaller part of the problem.

The comics, on the other hand, were an enormous mess. This was largely due to the fact that I'd gotten so far behind that I had several months worth of issues of the various books scattered in assorted spots in the pile, so there was no telling if I was picking up the oldest issue, the current issue, or something in between. This meant that I wasn't reading them often, because I didn't know where to start.

I pulled all of the comics off the shelf, took them to the bed, and sorted them out, reading several issues that were in the middle of sequences that I'd earlier pillaged both sides of. When Gretchen got home, we put the shelf back together. She then cleaned out around the toilet -- her idea, not mine :) -- and I put the shelf back and dropped my reading material back onto it.

I guess I should start plowing through the stacks...

Among the members of the Legion of Substitute Proofreaders, we find Pedantic Lad. Although he is only an above average proofreader under normal circumstances, he has an uncanny ability to sniff out missing Oxford commas.

This makes him either incredibly useful or incredibly annoying, depending on which style guide you're using.