TOM STRONG #13

By: Tony Whitt
Date: Monday, July 02, 2001

The Tom Strong family Tom Strong himself, his daughter Tesla, a younger version of himself, and six foot tall talking rabbit Warren Strong come together for the first time to battle the evil Paul Saveen, Earth's deadliest science-villain! Saveen has fiendishly gathered versions of himself from all across the timestream, traveled to the Tower at Time's End, and stolen the ruby Capstone of Eternity for his own nefarious purposes! Can the Strong Family keep the Capstone safe from the surfeit of Saveens? Can they stop the time-traveling trickster and his evil clan from taking over all of time itself? Buy this full-length novel and find out!

You gotta love Alan Moore. Anyone who takes his own creation and spoofs it by recreating a piece of comic book history as cheesy as the Marvel Family deserves kudos, especially when he can pull it off with such brilliance and style. Not to mention the fact that there hasn't been anything quite this hilarious since DC's WORLD'S FUNNEST. Very few other writers have Moore's ability to take on the "voice" of a past era in comics (or even literature, as his LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN also proves) with such authenticity. Even when the dialogue veers into jokes that never would have made it past a Fawcett Comics editor back in the '50s as when Warren Strong's bunny girlfriend Patience, in one of the book's most hilarious scenes, says that he was the best buck she ever had it doesn't sound in the least bit out of place. Moore also manages to represent the entire Marvel Family clan with his characters, despite the fact that there's no Uncle Marvel (thank goodness). Holy Moley there's even a Shazam stand-in here!

The four artists that aid and abet Moore in this exercise also enter into the sense of fun. With the sole exception of Russ Heath, who has mastered the "funny animals" style of comic art but has trouble including human characters in it, each artist flawlessly creates a visual style reminiscent of the original WHIZ COMICS stories that inspired this issue. Kyle Baker's artwork needs no adaptation to fit in with this style, while Chris Sprouse's efforts look a bit more like the later DC versions of the Marvel Family stories. But the real winner of the lookalike contest is Pete Poplaski, whose work closes the book his pages recall not only the earliest Captain Marvel stories but also the flawless mimicry of the early MAD MAGAZINE parodies of comic books done in the '50s by Wally Wood. Even the plot in Poplaski's section recalls such parodies, showing us just how seriously Moore is taking the entire enterprise.


Even if you're not a fan of Moore or of TOM STRONG, this issue is worth a peek. And if you are a fan of the Big Red Cheese (which Moore himself obviously is), it's worth more than that. Only a true fan could pull off something like this or appreciate it fully.

TOM STRONG

Grade: A

Issue: No. 13

Author(s): Alan Moore, Chris Sprouse, Al Gordon, Pete Poplaski, Kyle Baker, Matt Hollingsworth, Todd Klein

Publisher: America's Best Comics

Price: $2.95