Strange Adventures 1

On the one hand, I’m all for a revival of DC’s ancient SF anthology; on the other hand, this is Vertigo, and I often get exasperated with them. Unfortunately the balance comes down on that side, for me.

We get nine stories of around 8 pages each, behind a lively Paul Pope cover, and they do lean towards Vertigo’s faults. They’re often wilfully oblique: yes, you can throw us in the middle of something, but in such short pieces, you can be pretty near the end before you feel like you’re getting a grip on the world. They’re often very negative, cynical – I guess it’s unreasonable to expect anything else these days, though. Obviously there is more sex and violence than in the old days, too. I don’t see any of these things as positives.

The feature highlighted on the cover is part one of a series by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso, called Spaceman. There is no spaceman in episode one. It’s hard to derive too much from, except a sense that the protagonist is genetically enhanced to be stronger. It looks quite nice, except where the Millerisms are especially blatant.

There is one revived character: Ultra the Multi-Alien, a particularly silly old superhero, here treated with glum seriousness by Jeff Lemire, to no great effect – there’s nothing to suggest this is more than a one-off revival, and he’s surely not worth more, short of a brilliant Morrisonesque rethinking.

There are some parts I quite liked: Juan Bobillo’s apparently crayoned art on a VR story (there’s another one of those two stories later, surprisingly); Peter Milligan’s ‘Partners’, a story of some emotional and fantasy tension, with clean art by Sylvain Savola; Ross Campbell’s oddly slow but moody ‘Refuse’, which he draws in a rather European style; Kevin Colden’s ‘Postmodern Prometheus’ is not at all postmodern, but has some strength despite an unpersuasive ending; a Paul Cornell ’50s flying saucer story is uninteresting, but I really like Goran Sudzuka’s clear and bright artwork.

So a mixed bag, for me, with nothing at all that I thought that highly of and a few that irritated me. I guess if you love the general Vertigo tone and approach and have a hankering for some SF shorts, this might appeal, but I don’t see it finding a very big audience.