A Job for the Thinking Man's Superhero

Adam Strange was the thinking man’s superhero of the late 1950s, rendered with a sleek, space-age elegance by Carmine Infantino and written with reassuring intelligence by Gardner Fox.

I always liked him, but I was an adult before it suddenly dawned on me that Adam Strange was conceived as an exact mirror-reversal of the same company’s flagship character, Superman.

Instead of a man sent to Earth from an exotic planet to act as a savior with his superhuman powers, we have a man sent to an exotic planet from Earth to act as a savior with his human powers.

Superman overcomes all obstacles with his superior physical powers, but Adam Strange has none. Thanks to his access to alien technology, he does have a rocket belt and a ray gun, but they provide little or no help to Strange in fending off the overwhelming alien menaces that appear whenever he returns to visit his sweetheart on the planet Rann.

Lacking Superman’s brawn, Adam Strange relies solely on his brain, reasoning his way out of every dilemma, no matter how difficult. Here, you see him explaining his deductive reasoning about how to defeat alien invaders’ vacuumizer weapons to the much-rescued citizens of Rann (Mystery in Space 63, Nov. 1960).

This celebration of reason and critical thinking is sorely needed today, in dumbed-down, shoot-first, rant-and-rave 21st century America. But for that reason, nobody is now much interested in Adam Strange. And that’s too bad for us all.