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| Comic trade paperback, n.pag. Published 2003 (contents: 1990) Acquired and read April 2016 |
Writer: Richard Bruning
Illustrator: Andy KubertColor Artist: Adam Kubert
Letterer: Todd Klein
I only just realized that I missed this story in my journey through DC's "space heroes" comics; I should have read it around the time I read L.E.G.I.O.N., though it's not a big deal, as its connections to other comics are slight. The Man of Two Worlds is definitely a product of the time that brought us Animal Man and Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters: this is a darker reinvention of the Adam Strange story. Adam is a archaeologist periodically transported from Earth to the planet Rann by the zeta beam, which allows him to adventure there (complete with jet pack) for a short time before he's zapped back to Earth until the next zeta beam hits. On Rann, he has a wife named Alanna, whose father, Sardath is the inventor of the zeta beam and the leader of the council that rules Ranagar, the foremost citystate of Rann.
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| It's sort of a modern Doctor Who question, isn't it? What kind of home life must someone have who's like, "Well, I'm going to cut off contact with everything and everyone I ever loved and have space adventures"? Though I'd probably go for space adventures no matter how good my home life was. from Adam Strange vol. 1 #1 |
Bruning questions this whole setup in classic late 1980s/early 1990s fashion. Why would Adam be so willing to give up his home planet? Why can't the people of Rann solve their own problems? He explore Adam's family history, and also the political and biological situation on Rann: the planet is sterile, both literally and spiritually. Thanks to technology, reproduction rates and sexual interest are plummeting, and the Rannians lack the spiritual energy to do anything about their own problems. They can't do anything without Adam, but they resent him for that fact, which Sardath is careful to keep from him, since he needs Adam to reinvigorate Rann: Alanna is pregnant with Adam's child, the first child to be born on Rann in a generation.
It's a "dark" and "gritty" take on what was a pretty clear-cut superhero archetype. On Earth for the last time before the "mega zeta beam" whisks him to Rann permanently, Adam visits his sister and his dying father, and remembers the aspects of his childhood that turned him into a loner and an outcast, the kind of person who would be eager to give up his life and start a new one that is fundamentally a fantasy. But for reasons Adam doesn't quite understand, he's afraid of moving to Rann permanently, and he almost cheats on Alanna with Eve Fox, the doctor caring for his father. It would be easy to dismiss this as gratuitous "grittiness," but it really works on a couple levels.
